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Posted on 09/27/2006 11:05:54 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Almost anyone who visits Prague City Museum's new exhibition "Through the Valley of Shadows" is likely to feel at least somewhat humbled, given that the exhibition deals with one of humankind's most important rituals: burial. Organisers set out to show how the burial rite was approached over a period of roughly 7,000 years - from the Stone Age to the early Middle Ages... Archaeologist Michal Lutovsky describes the practice as it was up to the Bronze Age... "We'll never be able to know some things for certain - some symbolic meanings - but from the start of the Neolithic up until around the 1,800 years BC, individuals were traditionally buried in the foetal position. The reason 'why' is open to interpretation: some think that it echoed the original position in the womb. In other cases, there may have been other reasons. Bodies were sometimes tied into position, indicating something else: a possible fear of the deceased's return. People had some reason to fear the deceased might come back."
(Excerpt) Read more at radio.cz ...
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Various complicated and mysterious interpretations notwithstanding...
...."in other cases, it allowed the digging of a much smaller hole."
We know that but would a Neolithic person know that babies are curled in the womb? Babies don't come out curled up.
> We know that but would a Neolithic person know that babies are curled in the womb? Babies don't come out curled up.
All it would take for the Neolithics to find out for sure would be to cut open a pregnant woman. A ghastly experiment for sure, but not beyond the powers of Neolithic mankind to dream up.
Even easier would be to observe the growing foetus as it develops in its mother's womb: after a few months the position of the head, the legs, the arms become pretty evident -- as anybody who has had a pregnant wife will know.
I suspect Neolithic cultures were far more self-aware than our modern cultures would give them credit for.
And they did this enough that an entire culture was influenced to bury their dead that way for thousands of years?
Doubtful.
More likely is that people tend to sleep curled up and that was what influenced it.
Its actually pretty simple, you got to dig a smaller hole.
:')
Or, they were just trying to keep the limbs from flopping around while they were stuffing them into the hole.
The fact that they took the time to treat dead bodies in any way at all shows they had feelings for their deceased loved ones. :') Jug or jar burials continued into early classical times, at least.
Wow, it’s been just over a year since I’ve heard your bark.
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