Eleven cranial trepanation on a woman’s skull in India: Neolithic Alignments

by Iharka Szücs-Csillik, Alexandra Comsa & Anek R. Sankhyan

An interdisciplinary work among anthropologist, archaeologist and astronomer

can give a very interesting point of view of the problem like in this article.
The authors investigated a woman’s skeleton with many cranial trepanations
from the Neolithic age (around 2000 BC) in Burzahom (North India). The young women
(circa 28 years old) had eleven trepanations, nine of which were performed while alive
and two post-mortem (Fig. 1). It is a unique situation globally, because a skull with so
many holes (made alive) from Neolithic period does not exist in widely in the literature.

Fig. 1 Dr. A.R. Sankhyan showing the Harappan (Right) and Burzahom (Left) trepanned
skulls in his laboratory at Anthropological Survey of India, Kolkata
 The anthropological and archaeological analyses had revealed that the woman
was suffering from a brain anomaly (tumor), head injury and was insane or epileptic
(Sankhyan and Weber, 2011).

The authors developed an astronomical orientation study to see if the skeletons

in the small cemetery were aligned to a certain direction or about the solar arc (the zone
on a horizon where during a year the Sun apparently moves at sunrises and sunsets),
as we can find at many Neolithic community from Europe. In fact, every element of the
funerary ritual had its own significance and reveals to us parts of the ancient way of
thinking.

We found that the skeletons where not uniformly orientated, moreover, we

discovered a strange skeleton, which was orientated exactly in the North direction (Fig.
2).

Fig. 2. Solar arc and skeletons orientation.

The research at this point became exciting, because for some Neolithic
community the North direction was sacred. The polestar provides the North point in the
northern hemisphere. Many Neolithic communities who relied upon the concept of North
point attached at the World Axes as a major belief were probably shamanistic ones. The
North point should represent a spot where the living people could communicate with the
dead by the facilities created by a specialized person.

For most Neolithic populations the world comprised three realms: the upper
world, the underworld and the intermediate world. These three worlds was connected
with the World Axis.

Why North? Why eleven trepanations? Who can drilled these holes in a skull and
can cure the woman? Who was the surgeon-medical man? So many questions…
The North is on the World Pillar (Axis Mundi), the Pole Star direction, which was
not the same with Polaris star from Ursa Minor constellation.
Thuban star was the Pole Star around 2000 BC, today is Polaris star is. Ancient
texts describe Thuban star (Draco constellation) as exactly marking the North Pole in
2787 BC.
In the meantime, Dr. Anek Ram Sankhyan (2015) made a comparative
morphological new study on the skeleton that was orientated perfectly toward North. Dr.
Sankhyan found that: “this skeleton belonged to a man 51- 55 years of age at death,
who was very robust with a round head and receding forehead, and his nose and face
was very broad. He was distinct among all other Burzahom skeletons that belong to
long-headed people with long and narrow faces and longer noses. One very similar
skull (NGK 7) was in contemporary Neolithic population of Nagarjunakonda of Andhra
Pradesh, South India”. Therefore, Dr. Sankhyan believe that the man was brought to the
community as a medical and spiritual healer – a shaman, for the treatment of the young
woman. He treated her first spiritually, then medically and finally surgically. Probably, for
his acts of kindness he was allowed to stay with them, and after death was buried within
their settlement.
We can conclude, firstly that our interdiciplinarity work made an innovation, so
the method is a good key for future discoveries. Secondly, our research developed a
story from Neolithic of a young, ill lady from North India (near Himalayan Mountains,
Kashmir), who was helped by her family from the outside danger, and an incomer man,
who came from South India (near see, a distance circa 2500 km) to calmed her
sufferings using a carefully trephine technique (Fig. 3). Thirdly, the last two holes were a
post-mortem study, therefore, we are thinking that the migrant man was a medical
specialist, who knew and studied the trepanation mechanism.
 Fig. 3. The distance between Burzahom and Nagarjuna Hill (See
www.google.com\maps\).

These findings were described in the article entitled Astronomical orientation of the
trepanned Neolithic woman of Burzahom, Kashmir, published in the BAR International
Series 2015 “Recent Discoveries and Perspectives in Human Evolution”.

Please see in details the following two papers:

Anek R. Sankhyan and George H.J. Weber. 2001.
Evidence of Surgery in Ancient India: Trepanation at Burzahom (Kashmir) over 4000
Years Ago. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 11: 375–380 (2001).
DOI: 10.1002/oa.579
Anek R. Sankhyan 2015. "Surgery in Ancient India" Encyclopaedia of the History of
Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-
3934-5_9727-2 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015.

This work was led by Iharka Szücs-Csillik (Astronomical Institute of Romanian

Academy, Cluj-Napoca), Alexandra Comsa (Archaeological Institute of Romanian
Academy) & Anek R. Sankhyan (Palaeo Research Society, India).