THE CULT OF THE DEAD
At Mount Carmel, in Israel, the small cave of Skhul was used for burial purposes, while the larger cave of Tabun, about a hundred metres away, was the rock shelter used as a residence (Garrod & Bate 1937).
A similar situation was recorded at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, in France, where a small cave was used as a burial ground. Objects of daily use accompanied the dead in their tombs. Similar burials with funerary goods are recorded at Teshik-Tash in central Asia (Anati 1999). All over Europe and the Middle East, the recurrent habit was that the body of the deceased was laid down in a pit, in a sleeping posture, with tools of daily use and food deposited nearby. The same behaviour is found in Europe, the Near East and central Asia, indicating the widespread presence of common rituals, of an ideology, and a doctrine (Anati 1999).The food placed near the dead was not a reserve for a long period. It was enough for one meal or one day. It probably was a snack for a short journey.
In a burial excavated at La Ferrassie, Dordogne, France, Denis Peyrony found a fragment of animal bone which had been cut with a flint instrument on both sides. It is the testimony to the piece of meat which would have been placed near the dead. The flint tools were knives and scrapers representing what the hunter or the traveller could normally have taken with him. Several other cases of funerary goods and food are known from the Middle Palaeolithic, both in Europe and the Near East. The most famous case is that of the Skhul cave at Mount Carmel in Israel. The mandible of a boar was found to be held under (the bones of) the arm of the deceased (Garrod & Bate 1937; Anati 1999).
The fact that the dead were given food implies the belief that something alive survived the dead body. The deceased were not totally dead if they required food and tools. The body remained in the grave, but part of the deceased was supposed monoliths are concentrated.
The mountain thus appears as a large female body, the breasts being the two hills at the top, the legs are the edges of the mountain and the small valley is the vagina (Anati 2007a: 122).Here early humans concentrated the anthropomorphic orthostats. The site appears as the evocation of a myth according to which these stone-beings are born from the vagina of the Mother Mountain. Who were these stone spirits? What is the myth behind such an installation? What symbolism is expressed by the symbiosis between the shapes created by man and the shapes of nature?
If such a group of orthostats had been studied without considering the surrounding landscape, it would have had little meaning. The landscape is the main clue for understanding the background. The monument created by these people consists of a few stones having natural shapes, which have been selected, collected, transported and installed in a locality chosen by the imagination of the human mind. The sense of the sanctuary, in this case, is in the landscape.
The importance that the interpretation of the landscape occupied among Stone Age people is stressed by the analogy of the Har Karkom sanctuary with some sites of Australian Aborigines, of Central African Pygmies, or of the North Canadian Inuit. In the case of the recent hunters, and probably also in the prehistoric cases, the interpretation of the shapes of nature has a paramount relevance for the analogical concepts and the related rites. Still today, among hunting-gathering people, nothing in nature is meaningless. Every shape must be interpreted and understood. According to an Australian aboriginal wise-man “the landscape is the way by which the spirits of the dreamtime conveyed their messages” (Northern Territories, unpublished personal field notes 1974).
In the ethnographic cases mentioned, such places are sacred because of their special landscape. They are believed to shelter ancestral spirits and serve as places of communion between the living and the dead. The installation at Har Karkom may turn out to be the earliest known testimony of human interpretation and explanation of landscape.
Monuments such as the one found at Har Karkom reflect an ideology, and a mythology. It was set up by the common effort of a community, to create a site of no economic function for the communal use of the human group. It seems that here we have all the elementary ingredients to consider the site as a sanctuary having religious purposes and functions. It would be the earliest known manmade sanctuary in the world. It is not unlikely that other similar prehistoric sites may have existed. The unique case of Har Karkom is in the preservation of both the landscape and the standing stones in an area without traces of sedentary settlements.