Site 16-D-4

This site was shortly investigated in the 2004 field season to establish whether it was a cemetery or not as during the survey season an un-complete skeleton was found lying on the eroded surface. After a small test trench excavation (5x5 m) confirmed this hypothesis a more systematic archaeological work was planned for this field season.
Another 4 trenches of 5x5 m were opened to the west of the one investigated in 2004, oriented N-S.
In this area 21 graves were excavated. Two basic different level of deposition were recognised corresponding more o less to a chronological differentiation. Mesolithic graves appeared soon after surface cleaning indicating that a strong erosion had affected the original deposit, while the pits of the Neolithic graves had been cutting through the underlying sterile deposit.
Of these 21 graves, two were not cleaned for shortage of time and four were very badly preserved, concentrations of bones still in anatomical connection.
The Mesolithic graves (11-12-14-17-18) display a model completely different from the Neolithic one. Bodies are lying stretched, in some case on the ventral side (Fig. 15). Arms are normally along the body or crossing each other at the height of the pelvis. No grave goods were found in these excavated sample.
The Neolithic graves were lying in a flexed position (Fig. 13), sometimes with the legs tightly gathered to the chest as to suggest the use of some cordage to tight them or of some cotton cloth to wrap them.
Some of the graves had some burial goods, but rather few in fact.
An exceptional case is the double burial of a male and a female (Fig. 13). The male had two ostrich eggshell pendants at neck height (Fig. 14). Common to other Neolithic graveyards is a lip-plug found still in place in the mandible of one of the individual.
An un-explicable case is that of three Neolithic pots found with no association to a human burial. It is possible that if the grave was that of a child the body had gone destroyed by the many animal burrows that disturbed the archaeological deposit.

Fig. 13	Fig. 14	Fig. 15

Palaeoenvironmental and palaeodietary studies

During the present field season a collection of modern plants and bones from the surrounding area had also been made. The collected samples will be measured in laboratory for their stable isotope content. These measurements will successively be compared with the same kind of measurements carried out on the archaeological remains (animal and human bones) found in the 16D4 and 16D5 sites. In this way it is possible to reconstruct the diet of the ancient populations living in the area and, in the same time, the climatic conditions in terms of temperature and aridity, in the studied area.