How it began
'Ain Ghazal is a Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlement on the edge of present-day Amman, beside the Zarqa River. Between about 7200 and 6250 BCE its people made statues and busts of the human figure in lime plaster over reed frames. Fifteen statues and fifteen busts were found in 1983 and 1985 in two underground caches made about 200 years apart. They are described as among the earliest large-scale representations of the human form.
Before it existed
Human figures of the same period elsewhere in the Neolithic Near East were small figurines of clay or stone. At 'Ain Ghazal, plaster was already used to cover the walls and floors of houses and to model faces on the skulls of the dead. The statues, 35 to 100 cm high, applied that building material to free-standing figures much larger than the figurines of the time.
How it works
Lime plaster is made by heating limestone to between 600 and 900 degrees Celsius, then mixing the lime with water into a dough that hardens and resists water once dry. At 'Ain Ghazal the plaster matches marl found on the site. Makers tied bundles of reeds with cord to form heads, torsos and legs, plastered them, and joined the parts. A replication study by Carol Grissom of the Smithsonian showed the figures had to be plastered lying flat and stood up only after the plaster stiffened, which explains their flat fronts and backs. Eyes were outlined with bitumen.
What changed first
The purpose of the statues is uncertain. Archaeologists think they may have been buried soon after they were made, and they have been read as representations of ancestors or as objects for ritual burial. The two caches show the practice continued for about two centuries. The reeds decayed in the ground and left hollow plaster shells.
Where it stands today
Because the plaster was fragile, the caches were lifted from the ground as whole blocks in 1983 and 1985 and conserved over many years, the second cache at the Smithsonian Institution. Most of the statues are now in the Jordan Museum in Amman, with others in the Jordan Archaeological Museum on the Amman Citadel. One statue is on loan to the Louvre in Paris, parts of two are in the British Museum in London, and a two-headed figure is shown at the Louvre Abu Dhabi.
