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Paper short abstract:

The monuments and funerary practices of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic are parts of a fractal collectivity, the interstices of which are haunted by the remains and representations of singular and troubled bodies.

Paper long abstract:

The large settlements of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Levant and Anatolia (9500-6500 BCE) are known for their elaborate monumental architecture and refined funerary practices. This complexity was probably not entirely “egalitarian”, but neither did it translate into marked social differences: the monuments were neither tombs nor elite residences, while the dead bodies were often divided up and accumulated together in the same spots. All in all, the archaeological findings do not easily fit models of stratification vs. equality, but can be understood through the notion of an embodied person as a whole that can be fragmented, yet is itself fragment of a wider whole. Rather than an association of equals, neolithic collectivist sociality was “fractal”, playing on the self-similarity of scale and suppressing discrete and indivisible units.

In this relational context, however, individuals do have a place. In the deep enclosed rooms of the monuments, where only a small fraction of society could have entered, solitary and asocial creatures waited in the dark. In the ruins of some of these buildings, archaeologists also found the tortured remains of selected bodies, excluded from usual funerary treatments and subjected to an untimely death. If ever there was ‘egalitarianism’ in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, it must be found in the nightmares of this solitude.