Ancient cave speaks of Hades myth

— -- Hades wasn't the happiest place, the Department of Motor Vehicles of the ancient Greek afterlife.

There, in a gloomy underworld, departed heroes such as Achilles gathered mostly to grouse about their boredom, and await the verdict of the judges of the dead.

"I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead," said Achilles, the greatest of Greek heroes, commenting on the scenery, according to the ancient poem, The Odyssey. (Tough break for Achilles, but perhaps he was later cheered to learn that Brad Pitt would play him in the 2004 filmTroy. )

But for archaeologists, a Greek cave that has sparked comparisons to Hades looks more like heaven. Overlooking a quiet Greek bay, Alepotrypa Cave contains the remains of a Stone Age village, burials, a lake and an amphitheater-sized final chamber that saw blazing rituals take place more than 5,000 years ago. All of it was sealed from the world until modern times, and scholars are only now reporting what lies within.

"What you see there almost cannot be described," says archaeologist Anastasia Papathanasiou of the Greek Ministry of Culture, a director of the Diros Project Team. "There is almost no Neolithic (Stone Age) site like it in Europe, certainly none with so many burials."

So far, her team has uncovered about 160 burials inside the cave, from a time 7,000 to 5,200 years ago (5000 to 3200 BC) when farming first spread to Europe. The lives those farmers led inside and outside the cave, across the remote Mani Peninsula of southern Greece, offer fresh insights into life at the dawn of civilization in Europe.

"They were living in a large village outside the cave," says Mike Galaty of Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., a co-director of the project's survey efforts with Willam Parkinson of Chicago's Field Museum. "And some were inside too, we think, when the entrance collapsed," Galaty says.

Inside, the cave is covered with a layer of greasy ash , left over from ritual fires that may have marked burials there (and reburials, as many of the skeletons are within ossuaries, stone boxes where remains were placed years after their first burial.) "It is quite dark inside, quite black," Papathanasiou says. "But the state of preservation is excellent."

From that preservation, they know the Stone Age farmers at the site ate a diet heavy in barley and wheat with little meat or fish. Although a full reconstruction of the region's prehistoric climate awaits, they know from plant remains that it was wetter and more forested in ancient times. And analyses of the burial skeletons show people who were not much different physically from those in the Mediterranean today, almost as tall as tall as Greeks today, although they were slightly anemic due to a lack of meat in their diet.

About 31% of the burial skulls display an inherited line where bone plates meet, above the forehead, showing they were related, Papathanasiou says. And the noggins show a lot of signs of healed bumps and cuts, she adds. "They fought a lot."