Price: $150

Description: “About 6000 years B.C. a group of hunter-foragers at Jericho exhumed the cranium of the recent burial of one of their elders. Preparing lime-based plaster, they applied it to the facial aspect of the bare skull, then sculpted a new face on it (they overmodeled the skull). Eight thousand years later several Melanesian island-based groups carried out a similar ritual using a vegetable putty. . . . This book documents the major effort to fill the information gap between these two extreme times and locations. . . . The authors’ exhaustive reports of this rare mortuary practice couple the modern ethnographic data to the archaeological findings, providing the best possible understanding of what appears to have been a unique and dramatic effort to smooth the passage from the Land of the Living to that of the Dead.”

Condition: Very good