Posted on 10/31/2005 4:06:20 PM PST by blam
Last Update: Monday, October 31, 2005. 6:03pm (AEDT)
Polynesian cemetery unlocks ancient burial secrets
By Anna Salleh, ABC Science Online
The first people to settle Polynesia went to surprising lengths to honour their dead, archaeologists show.
Remains from the oldest cemetery in the Pacific suggest the Lapita people buried their dead in many different ways, some in "weird yoga positions", and removed their skulls for ceremonial purposes.
Dr Stuart Bedford and Professor Matthew Spriggs of the Australian National University reported their finds on the Lapita culture in Vanuatu at a recent seminar in Canberra.
"We found for the first time skulls buried in a pot, sealed by a flat bottomed ceramic dish that had been overturned and used as a lid on top of another pot," Dr Bedford said.
The site Dr Bedford and Professor Spriggs have been excavating is at Teouma in Vanuatu and is 3,100 years old.
They found evidence of 25 burials, all skeletons without their skulls.
The researchers found teeth where the head should be.
Dr Bedford says this is evidence the heads were not being pulled off soon after death but were removed after decomposition.
"Clearly there is a reverence for the head as it's being removed," he said.
Apart from the skull found in the pot, the researchers found another three skulls on the chest of the remains of one person.
Dr Bedford says removing skulls of the deceased was a long-standing practice in the Pacific before the missionaries arrived, with skulls often being removed to ceremonial houses.
The Lapita people could be the source of the practice.
"We're getting evidence that this burial practice is 3,000 years old," he said.
'Weird yoga positions
Dr Bedford and Professor Spriggs also found a huge diversity in the way bodies were buried at Teouma.
They say most were buried horizontally, mostly on their back in amongst holes in an old uplifted reef.
"This pottery bird was one of many on the inner rim of one pot, looking down on ancestral bones, but some were found lying on their front, which he says is very unusual," Dr Bedford said.
Others, still were found with their legs bent up or in what Dr Bedford describes as "weird yoga positions".
GGG Ping.
bump
Honor the Ancestors -- universal in Neolithic but still very strong in East Asia. That would certainly include Borneo. Good find.
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