Ain Ghazal plaster statues and their conservation history

Record summary

The plaster statues from Ain Ghazal, a Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlement, became a major subject of conservation, imaging, and interpretive work during the 1990s. Their modeled bodies, enlarged eyes, and deliberate burial contexts provide evidence for changing mortuary and communal practices in the southern Levant. The objects matter for comparison with later ancestor imagery and ritual representation. Their original social function, production sequence, and relationship to household or community rites remain uncertain, while reconstructions and museum displays can make fragmentary evidence appear more complete than it is.