Ain Ghazal Statues: Neolithic Plaster Figures from Jordan

The Ain Ghazal statues are a group of about 32 human figures made of lime plaster around 6500 BC at Ain Ghazal, a large Neolithic village on what is now the edge of Amman, Jordan. Found buried in two caches in 1983 and 1985, they rank among the oldest large-scale representations of the human body ever discovered. With their wide, staring eyes and flat bodies, they offer a rare glimpse into the beliefs of some of the world’s earliest farming communities.

The village of Ain Ghazal

Ain Ghazal, Arabic for “spring of the gazelle”, lies on the Zarqa River on the north-eastern outskirts of Amman. The site was discovered in 1974 when a new highway was cut through it, and systematic excavations took place from 1982 to 1989 and again from 1993 to 1996. They were led by Gary Rollefson, with Alan Simmons, Zeidan Kafafi and colleagues.

The village was occupied from about 7250 to 5000 BC, across several phases of the late Neolithic. It began in the Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, grew greatly in the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B and continued, in changing form, into the Pottery Neolithic period.

At its height, Ain Ghazal covered roughly 10–15 hectares, several times larger than earlier villages such as Neolithic Jericho. The excavators estimated a peak population of perhaps 2,500–3,000 people, making it one of the largest settlements of its time in the Near East.

Life in a Neolithic megasite

People at Ain Ghazal lived in rectangular houses with stone walls and thick floors of lime plaster, often painted red. They grew wheat, barley, peas, lentils and chickpeas and herded domestic goats, part of the wider domestication of sheep and goats. They also hunted gazelle, wild cattle and other animals.

The dead were often buried beneath house floors. As at other Pre-Pottery Neolithic B sites, some skulls were later removed, and several were remodelled with plaster to recreate the face. Small clay figurines of animals and humans were also common, including cattle figurines, a few of which had been stabbed with flint blades, perhaps in some form of ritual.

The discovery of the statues

In 1983 the excavators found a pit containing around 25 plaster figures, carefully laid in layers. About half were full-length standing statues and the rest were busts. This first cache is usually dated to around 6750 BC.

In 1985 a second pit, a short distance away, yielded seven more figures dated to about 6500 BC. These included full figures, busts and two remarkable two-headed busts, which have no known parallel elsewhere.

The figures were found lying flat, in an orderly arrangement, which suggests they had been deliberately buried rather than discarded. They were fragile and had been crushed by the weight of soil above them, so they were lifted in blocks and sent abroad for conservation.

How the statues were made

Conservators in London and Washington spent years studying and restoring the figures. Their work showed exactly how the statues were built.

The makers first formed a core of bundled reeds or grasses tied with cord, shaped roughly like a human figure. They then covered it with lime plaster, a material produced by burning limestone at high temperatures and mixing the result with water. The plaster was modelled into faces, torsos and legs, and smoothed to a fine surface.

The tallest full figures stand around a metre high, while the busts are smaller. Faces received the most attention: noses, mouths and especially the wide almond-shaped eyes were carefully modelled, with the irises and outlines picked out in bitumen. Traces of paint suggest that some figures had painted clothing, hair or body markings. The bodies, by contrast, are flat and simplified, and some have only rudimentary arms.

What did the statues mean?

No one knows for certain what the statues represented. Because they were made to stand upright and seen from the front, many researchers think they were displayed during ceremonies, perhaps propped up in a special building or open space, and later buried when their use was over.

Suggested interpretations include ancestors, mythical or legendary figures, protective spirits and leaders. The close link with plastered skulls has led some scholars to connect the statues with ancestor veneration, a widespread theme in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Levant. The two-headed busts might represent paired figures or beings with a dual nature, but this is speculation.

The statues are part of a wider tradition of monumental symbolic objects in the early Neolithic Near East, which includes the carved pillars of Göbekli Tepe and the painted houses of Çatalhöyük.

Conservation and display

Lifting and restoring the statues was a major technical challenge. The plaster was soft, cracked and mixed with soil, and the reed cores inside had long since decayed, leaving hollow spaces. Rather than dig the figures out one by one on site, the excavators removed whole blocks of earth containing them, strengthened with plaster and other supports.

The first cache was taken to the Institute of Archaeology in London, and the second to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Conservators carefully cleaned the fragments, used X-rays and other scans to understand the internal structure, and reassembled the figures piece by piece. Much of what is known about how the statues were built comes from this work, which took more than a decade.

The restored statues were returned to Jordan. Several are now displayed in the Jordan Museum in Amman, which opened in 2014, and others in the Jordan Archaeological Museum on the Amman Citadel. Their haunting faces have made them national symbols and favourite images of Jordan’s ancient past, and individual figures have travelled abroad for international exhibitions.

Because so few statues of this size survive from the Neolithic, the Ain Ghazal figures appear in many general histories of art. They are often compared with the plastered skulls of Jericho and with the carved stone heads and pillars of south-eastern Turkey, which together show how varied early Neolithic representations of the human body could be.

The decline of Ain Ghazal

Around 6000 BC Ain Ghazal shrank and changed in character. Houses became smaller and simpler, and the economy relied more on herding.

Rollefson and Ilse Köhler-Rollefson suggested that environmental damage played a role: burning lime for plaster needed large amounts of wood, and goat herds stripped vegetation, leading to erosion and reduced harvests. Others point to a wider pattern of climate change and social reorganisation across the Levant at the end of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B. The causes are still debated, and they were probably a combination of factors.

Timeline

• c. 7250 BC: Settlement begins at Ain Ghazal in the Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B.
• c. 6750 BC: The first cache of about 25 plaster figures is buried.
• c. 6500 BC: The second cache of seven figures, including two-headed busts, is buried.
• c. 6500–6000 BC: The village reaches its greatest size.
• c. 6000 BC: Ain Ghazal shrinks and its way of life changes.
• c. 5000 BC: The site is largely abandoned.
• 1974: Road construction exposes the site.
• 1983 and 1985: The two statue caches are excavated.

Why it matters

The Ain Ghazal statues are among the earliest large sculptures of the human form, made more than three thousand years before the first Egyptian pharaohs. They show that early farming communities invested great skill and effort in ritual objects, and they remain some of the most striking and mysterious artworks of the Neolithic world.