These Ancient Headless Corpses Were Defleshed By Griffon Vultures

At the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in ancient Anatolia (modern Turkey), archaeologists have long wondered about the presence of griffon vulture symbols throughout the settlement and about a series of headless skeletons buried under house floors. A newly published study seeks to connect these two phenomena in a process called "vulture excarnation" - defleshing of corpses by vulture prior to burial.

Çatalhöyük is well known to archaeologists around the world. One of the world's earliest cities, it arose around 7500 BC, 300km south of modern-day Ankara, Turkey. The site is a cluster of densely-packed mudbrick houses, with as many as 10,000 people living there at its height. Individual houses shared walls, to such an extent that there were no doors or windows for people to enter -- they had to go in through holes in the roof, making the tops of the buildings essentially streets. Walls, floors, and ceilings were all coated with plaster, and many were decorated with paintings and relief sculpture.

Burials at Çatalhöyük were made intramurally -- that is, underneath the floors, usually in the central room of the family's house. Skeletons of men, women, and children are found on their sides in a tightly flexed, fetal-like position, which suggests the bodies were wrapped or bound before burial. This is normal for Neolithic burials in ancient Anatolia, but at Çatalhöyük, archaeologists found 14 headless bodies.  Only one of them had cutmarks suggesting the body was probably defleshed by humans -- the rest were a mystery. Researchers have long considered the possibility, though, that vultures, which figure prominently into the murals and sculptures at the site, were involved in defleshing the body prior to burial.

In an attempt to resolve this question, a team of archaeologists including Marin Pilloud (University of Nevada, Reno), Scott Haddow (Université de Bordeaux), Christopher Knüsel (Université de Bordeaux), and Clark Larsen (The Ohio State University) scoured the forensic literature for information on the effect of vultures on dead bodies and delved into the iconography of vultures in the murals at Çatalhöyük. Their have reported their findings in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

A common vulture to inhabit Turkey is the griffon type (Gyps fulvus). Modern forensic studies of defleshing by the griffon vulture have found that the birds remove flesh and largely leave tendons and ligaments, meaning the connections between the bones are mostly preserved.  The birds leave some marks on bone, including puncture marks on the skull and shoulder blade, lines on the arm and leg bones, and a few V- and L-shaped marks. But in the forensic studies, the bones that had marks from the griffon vultures are few, and most bones have no indication at all that the vultures had defleshed the body. This means that attempting to find conclusive evidence of griffon vulture marks on bones dating to the Neolithic period is extremely difficult.

Pilloud and colleagues note that defleshing of the Çatalhöyük bodies could have been carried out in a number of ways, such as by fellow humans, by exposure to the elements, or by other animals.  But in each of those cases, they would expect to find evidence on the bones of those methods such as cut marks, sun bleaching, and carnivore marks -- none of which they found.

Although direct evidence of vulture predation on the human remains from Çatalhöyük is not yet available, Pilloud and colleagues add up a series of facts to create a strong circumstantial case for it:

1. The tightly flexed burials at Çatalhöyük mean some sort of pre-processing of the corpse was done prior to burial.  At the very least, because of rigor mortis (which would have prevented people from flexing the deceased's limbs), bodies were likely kept somewhere for a day or more.
2. Vultures are very good at removing flesh and keeping ligaments and tendons intact.  This would explain the fact that the skeletons at Çatalhöyük were connected anatomically rather than being just a pile of bones. 
3. Vulture excarnation would have reduced the odor of decay, which is important when burying the dead in a small, enclosed space under a house floor, such was common at the site.
4. Wall paintings at Çatalhöyük include representations of vultures attacking headless bodies, and there are skulls of griffon vultures embedded in plaster walls in some of the houses. Other ancient Anatolian sites also appear to have vulture iconography.  This strongly suggests some sort of symbolic relationship between the ancient culture and the vultures.

By placing the deceased on the rooftops of the houses, the people of Çatalhöyük would have made the bodies immediately attractive to the griffon vulture and would have kept the bodies away from terrestrial carnivores. The vultures would have eaten the muscles and left the tendons, allowing the people of Çatalhöyük to wrap the corpse in a tight bundle and then bury the deceased underneath the house floor.

The most likely explanation, then, for these headless burials "based on current forensic experimental work, [is] that the people of Çatalhöyük may have employed vulture excarnation prior to interment," the archaeologists conclude in their publication.  

While defleshing by carrion birds is not uncommon -- a similar form known as "sky burial" has long been practiced in parts of China, Tibet, Nepal, India, and Mongolia -- this potential evidence of vulture excarnation from Çatalhöyük makes the site one of the earliest in the world known to engage in this burial practice.

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