OTHER EARLY VILLAGE SITES IN THE NUCLEAR AREA
I’ll now name and very briefly describe a few of the other early village assemblages either in or adjacent to the hilly flanks of the crescent. Unfortunately, we do not have radioactive carbon dates for many of these materials. We may guess that some particular assemblage, roughly comparable to that of Hassuna, for example, must reflect a culture which lived at just about the same time as that of Hassuna. We do this guessing on the basis of the general similarity and degree of complexity of the Sears Roebuck catalogues of the particular assemblage and that of Hassuna. We suppose that for sites near at hand and of a comparable cultural level, as indicated by their generally similar assemblages, the dating must be about the same. We may also know that in a general stratigraphic sense, the sites in question may both appear at the bottom of the ascending village sequence in their respective areas. Without a number of consistent radioactive carbon dates, we cannot be precise about priorities.
SKETCH OF HASSUNA ASSEMBLAGE
POTTERY
POTTERY OBJECTS
CHIPPED STONE
BONE
GROUND STONE
ARCHITECTURE
REED MATTING
BURIAL
The ancient mound at Jericho, in the Dead Sea valley in Palestine, yields some very interesting material. Its catalogue somewhat resembles that of Jarmo, especially in the sense that there is a fair depth of deposit without portable pottery vessels. On the other hand, the architecture of Jericho is surprisingly complex, with traces of massive stone fortification walls and the general use of formed sun-dried mud brick. Jericho lies in a somewhat strange and tropically lush ecological niche, some seven hundred feet below sea level; it is geographically within the hilly-flanks zone but environmentally not part of it.
Several radiocarbon “dates” for Jericho fall within the range of those I find reasonable for Jarmo, and their internal statistical consistency is far better than that for the Jarmo determinations. It is not yet clear exactly what this means.
The mound at Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) contains a remarkably fine sequence, which perhaps does not have the gap we noted in Iraqi-Kurdistan between the Karim Shahir group and Jarmo. While I am not sure that the Jericho sequence will prove valid for those parts of Palestine outside the special Dead Sea environmental niche, the sequence does appear to proceed from the local variety of Natufian into that of a very well settled community. So far, we have little direct evidence for the food-production basis upon which the Jericho people subsisted.
There is an early village assemblage with strong characteristics of its own in the land bordering the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea, where Syria and the Cilician province of Turkey join. This early Syro-Cilician assemblage must represent a general cultural pattern which was at least in part contemporary with that of the Hassuna assemblage. These materials from the bases of the mounds at Mersin, and from Judaidah in the Amouq plain, as well as from a few other sites, represent the remains of true villages. The walls of their houses were built of puddled mud, but some of the house foundations were of stone. Several different kinds of pottery were made by the people of these villages. None of it resembles the pottery from Hassuna or from the upper levels of Jarmo or Jericho. The Syro-Cilician people had not lost their touch at working flint. An important southern variation of the Syro-Cilician assemblage has been cleared recently at Byblos, a port town famous in later Phoenician times. There are three radiocarbon determinations which suggest that the time range for these developments was in the sixth or early fifth millennium B.C.
It would be fascinating to search for traces of even earlier village-farming communities and for the remains of the incipient cultivation era, in the Syro-Cilician region.