Preserving Ancient Statues from Jordan
Exhibition brochure

Art and Society at `Ain Ghazal
At 'Ain Ghazal, as at other sites of the PPNB culture, people continuedearlier traditions of making small figurines of stone and clay depictinganimals and humans. A new feature of the PPNB culture was the making ofhuman-form figures in a scale much larger than the small figurines thatcould be held in one hand.
 Of all the objects recovered to date from 'Ain Ghazal, the most remarkableare the statues and busts made of plaster and carefully buried in pits underthe floors of abandoned houses. Fragments of similar statues, also carefullyburied, have been found at Neolithic Jericho and at the Nahal Hemar cavesite in Israel.

The statues from 'Ain Ghazal, however, are unique in their quantity andstate of preservation. In 1983 a cache containing about twenty-five statueswas lifted from the site and shipped to the Institute of Archaeology inLondon, where most are still being uncovered and preserved. In 1985 a secondcache of seven statues was recovered and subsequently shipped to the SmithsonianInstitution's Conservation Analytical Laboratory in suburban Washington,D.C., where they were uncovered, studied, and preserved for museum display.Together these two buried caches form the largest, best-preserved groupof plaster statues from any site in the Near East.

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 Last updated: July 28, 1996

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