Bucranium (plural bucrania) is the Latin word for the skull of an ox. It is also an architectural term used to describe a common form of carved decoration in Classical architecture, used to fill the metopes between the triglyphs of the frieze of Doric temples. A bas-relief or painted decor consisting of a series of ox-skulls draped or decorated with garlands of fruit or flowers was a Roman motif drawn from marble altars, which have survived in some number; the motif was also later used on Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical buildings. It is generally considered to be a reference to the practice of garlanding sacrificial oxen, the heads of which were primitively displayed on the walls of the temples, a practice with a long history reaching back to the sophisticated Neolithic site of Catalhoyuk in eastern Anatolia, where cattle skulls were overlaid with white plaster.

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