The Faces in the Pit: 'Ain Ghazal and the Plaster Statues of the Stone Age

About nine and a half thousand years ago, on a hillside above a small river at the edge of what is now Amman, a few people dug a pit through the floor of an empty house and laid in it twenty-five figures of white lime plaster, with wide painted eyes. Road builders found the village in 1974. This film tells the story of 'Ain Ghazal, the spring of the gazelle, one of the largest villages in the world in its time: its white plaster floors, its fields, goats and gazelle, the dead buried under the floors with plastered faces, the two caches of statues and how they were lifted and saved, the faces found across the southern Levant at Jericho, Kfar HaHoresh, Nahal Hemar and Ba'ja, the great villages, why the town grew small after about 6900 BC, and the herders who went out into the black desert. 0:00 The pit under the empty house 2:31 The spring of the gazelle 4:39 A village of white floors 6:56 Fields, goats and gazelle 9:53 The dead under the floors 11:49 Faces for the dead 14:49 The first cache 16:36 The faces of the first cache 18:39 The second cache 21:06 Two heads on one body 23:10 Faces across the southern Levant 26:17 The town across the river 28:19 The great villages 31:13 Plaster and goats 33:41 The town grows small 36:32 The herders of the black desert Photographs from Wikimedia Commons. Those under Creative Commons licences, by author and licence, with the time each first appears: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0: 13:09, 13:43, 16:36, 17:31, 18:33, 20:40, 38:22 Francesco Bini, CC BY-SA 4.0: 16:02, 21:06 Adeeb Atwan, CC BY 3.0: 28:33 Ana al'ain, CC BY-SA 3.0: 29:42 Artem.G, CC BY 4.0: 23:10 Bashar Tabbah, CC BY-SA 4.0: 4:25 Bukvoed, CC BY 4.0: 31:00 Godot13, CC BY-SA 4.0: 32:31 Hanay, CC BY 3.0: 25:35 Hanay, CC BY-SA 3.0: 35:05 MLWatts, CC BY-SA 4.0: 18:39 Mohammad hajeer, CC BY-SA 4.0: 38:35 Otis Historical Archives Nat'l Museum of Health & Medicine, CC BY 2.0: 9:36 Relly.hendel, CC BY-SA 4.0: 32:55 This file is a work by Ester Inbar (user:ST or he:user:ST). More of my work can be found in Category:Files by User:ST. If you use my work outside Wikimedia I would appreciate being notified and referred to site where used here, Attribution: 23:30 Viviane Slon, Rachel Sarig, Israel Hershkovitz , Hamoudi Khalaily, Ianir Milevski, CC BY 4.0: 25:06 Vojtěch Dostál, CC BY-SA 4.0: 30:38 The rest of the photographs are in the public domain or under CC0, from Gary Todd, Vassil, Daniel Tzvi and Freedom's Falcon. Maps drawn for this film from Natural Earth (public domain) and Terrain Tiles elevation and sea depth (SRTM, GMTED, ETOPO1). Music, our own piano recordings of songs from public-domain scores: Franz Schubert, Andante, String Quartet in E major, D. 353, second movement; Ludwig van Beethoven, Adagio cantabile, String Quartet No. 2, Op. 18 No. 2, second movement; Carl Nielsen, Andante amoroso, String Quartet No. 1, Op. 13, second movement; Edvard Grieg, Romanze, Andantino, String Quartet No. 1, Op. 27, second movement; Felix Mendelssohn, Adagio non lento, String Quartet No. 2, Op. 13, second movement; Johannes Brahms, Andante, String Quartet No. 3, Op. 67, second movement; Franz Schubert, Andante un poco moto, String Quartet in G major, D. 887, second movement. Made with AI: the narration is a synthetic voice, and the paintings in the film and the channel's opening and closing pictures were made with AI. The photographs and maps were not. #Prehistory #archaeology #documentary