Mesolithic mortuary ritual at Franchthi Cave, Greece ‘TRACEY CULLEN* Mesolithic sites are rare in the Aegean, and Mesolithic burials are uncommon throughoui Europe. The Mesolithic human remains from Franchthi Gave, that remarkable, deeply stratified site in southern Greece, offer a rare glimps into the burial practices of early Holocene hunter-gatherers of the Mediterranean. Franchthi Cave, on the east shore of the Gulf of Argos in southern Greece, is a key site for European prehistory. The cave’s complex stratigraphic sequence spans at least 25,000 years, from the Upper Palaeolithic through the Neolithic, with indications of possibly earlier occupation. The Mesolithic’ sequence at Franchthi is of special interest becaus very few Mesolithic sites have been discov- ered in the Aegean. The earliest secure evi- dence for mortuary ritual in Greece is found Lower Mesolithic levels at Franchthi, dat- ing to the 10th millennium b.p., when a clu: ter of eight burials, including two cremations, was placed near the mouth of the cave. An- other, more fragmentary burial can be attrib- uted to the following millennium, the Upper Mesolithic period, and 48 human bone frag- ments and teeth were found scattered and mixed with cultural debris in both Lower and Upper Mesolithic contexts. This small sam- ple, our only insight into Mesolithic burial practices in Greece, supports an intriguing image of emerging social complexity and col- lective ritual in the early Holocene, particu- larly when viewed against the wider backdrop of Mesolithic Europe and the Near East. 1. Considerable debate surrounds use of the term Meso lithic (soe e.g. Zvelebil 1986): 5~7). Researchers in south ‘er and southeastern Europe sometimes profer the term Epipalaeolithic, reserving Mesolithic for postglacial adap tations in northern Europe, where climatic changes were ‘more dramatic, The term Mesolithic has traditionally been employed to describe warly Holocene cultures in Greece, however, and I retain it here. * American Journal of 4 History of research at Franchthi Cave The site of Franchthi Cave occupies a rocky limestone headland on the southern coast o: the Argive peninsula (FIGURE 1). A horizon tal cavern some 150 m long offering secure shelter from predators and the extremes 01 climate, it has been used intermittently from the Upper Palaeolithic to the present. The most intensive occupation of the cave dates from c. 30,000(?) to 5000 b.p., the Upper Pal: aeolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic periods. producing a long sequence punctuated by several hiatuses. Massive rockfalls from the roof and brow have sent a cascade of boul- ders into the cave interior, opening two win- dows to the sky and limiting the area of excavation (FIGURE 2). The area outside the present cave entrance! and along the mod- ern shore (Paralia) has yielded only Neolithic and later material. Formal burials and exten- sive human bone scatter have been found in all parts of the site (Jacobsen & Cullen 1981). but the Mesolithic sample is limited to soundings within the cave. Excavations at Franchthi were directed by Thomas W. Jacobsen of Indiana University, over eight field seasons between 1967 and 1979. The exceptional standards of the Franchthi fieldwork have come to serve as a model for prehistoric excavation in Greece. 2 It is possible that the brow of the cave originally ox tended as far as the BE area, now a terrace in front of the cave (FIGURE 2), or even further {Wilkinson & Duhon 1990 14). Atleast one episode of breakdown has beon dated to the early part of the Neolithic period (Vitelli 1993: 65-6) -chaeology, 656 Beacon Street, Boston MA 02215-2010, USA. Received 20 November 1994, accepted & February 1995, received in final form 12 March 1995 Anmigurty 69 (1995): 270-89MESOLITHIC MORTUARY RITUAL AT FRANCHTHI CAVE, GREECE an Virtually all of the artefactual remains were saved, and close attention was given to cul- tural and environmental classes of material alike.’ A rigorous system of water-sieving was implemented in 1971, whereby sediment from four trenches in the cave, FAN, FAS, HA, and H1B, and selected samples from Paralia were water-sieved (Diamant 1979). Field recording methods improved with each season at Franchthi. Trench G1, located be- side the cave wall near the present entrance and excavated early on (1968), suffered par ticularly from excavators’ inexperience. Strata were cross-cut, and none of the sedi- ment was water-sieved, although it was passed through horizontal screens of gradu- ated size. In the early seasons, Greek work- men did ‘most of the excavating, sieving and heavy labor’, and kerosene lamps were re- placed in the deep trenches by electric lights 3. Subsequent seasons of geophysical soundings and off shore coring took place in 1981 and 1985 in the Bay of Koiladha, in front of the cave, concomed with defining the limits of the site and reconstructing the Pleistocene and Holocene shorelines (van Andel et ai. 1980; van Andol & Shackleton 1982; Gifford 1963; 1990). Several prolimi- nary reports (Jacobsen 1969; 1973a: 1973b; 1979; 1984) and gonoral syntheses (Jacobson 1976; 1981) have been pub- Tishod, and nine of a projected 20 specialist fascicles have appeared (Jacobsen & Farrand 1987; van Andel & Sutton 11987; Perlos 1987; 1990; Shackleton 1948; Wilkinson & Duhon 1990; Hansen 1991; Talalay 1993; Vitelli 1993). FIGURE 1. View of Franchthi Cave, from the north only in 1969 (Jacobsen 1969: 350, n. 14; 1973a: 57, n. 28). ‘These details of evolving field methodology are of more than academic interest when one considers the nature of the funerary sample from Franchthi. The Mesolithic burials were located in Trench G1, and, unfortunately, only one was recognized during excavation. As problems associated with the excavation of G1 have discouraged the project's specialists (for lithics, shell, etc.) from incorporating the G1 material in their studies, the immediate con- text of the Mesolithic burials is not well de- fined. The late J. Lawrence Angel of the Smith- sonian Institution was initially responsible for studying and publishing the human remains from Franchthi (Angel 1969; 1973). As was cus- tomary during the 1960s and '70s, he visited the project occasionally, when a sample had been accumulated to study. Thus, although several graduate students on the project had some training in physical anthropology, a pro- fessional human osteologist was rarely present during excavation. The impact of this proce- dure on the resulting sample was considerable. After Angel's death in 1986, Jacobsen invited me to complete the publication of the mortu- ary remains from the site, and Della Collins Gook of Indiana University agreed to work with me. Cook and I spent parts of three summers2m TRACEY CULLEN breakdown 10 15m RE 2. Exeavated areas of Franchthi Gave and Paralia. (From Hansen 1991: figure 5.)