The site of Jarmo has a depth of deposit of about twenty-seven feet, and approximately a dozen layers of architectural renovation and change. Nevertheless it is a “one period” site: its assemblage remains essentially the same throughout, although one or two new items are added in later levels. It covers about four acres of the top of a bluff, below which runs a small stream. Jarmo lies in the hill country east of the modern oil town of Kirkuk. The Iraq Directorate General of Antiquities suggested that we look at it in 1948, and we have had three seasons of digging on it since.
The people of Jarmo grew the barley plant and two different kinds of wheat. They made flint sickles with which to reap their grain, mortars or querns on which to crack it, ovens in which it might be parched, and stone bowls out of which they might eat their porridge. We are sure that they had the domesticated goat, but Professor Reed (the staff zoologist) is not convinced that the bones of the other potentially domesticable animals of Jarmo—sheep, cattle, pig, horse, dog—show sure signs of domestication. We had first thought that all of these animals were domesticated ones, but Reed feels he must find out much more before he can be sure. As well as their grain and the meat from their animals, the people of Jarmo consumed great quantities of land snails. Botanically, the Jarmo wheat stands about half way between fully bred wheat and the wild forms.
ARCHITECTURE: HALL-MARK OF THE VILLAGE
The sure sign of the village proper is in its traces of architectural permanence. The houses of Jarmo were only the size of a small cottage by our standards, but each was provided with several rectangular rooms. The walls of the houses were made of puddled mud, often set on crude foundations of stone. (The puddled mud wall, which the Arabs call touf, is built by laying a three to six inch course of soft mud, letting this sun-dry for a day or two, then adding the next course, etc.) The village probably looked much like the simple Kurdish farming village of today, with its mud-walled houses and low mud-on-brush roofs. I doubt that the Jarmo village had more than twenty houses at any one moment of its existence. Today, an average of about seven people live in a comparable Kurdish house; probably the population of Jarmo was about 150 people.
SKETCH OF JARMO ASSEMBLAGE
CHIPPED STONE
UNBAKED CLAY
GROUND STONE
POTTERY UPPER THIRD OF SITE ONLY.
REED MATTING
BONE
ARCHITECTURE
It is interesting that portable pottery does not appear until the last third of the life of the Jarmo village. Throughout the duration of the village, however, its people had experimented with the plastic qualities of clay. They modeled little figurines of animals and of human beings in clay; one type of human figurine they favored was that of a markedly pregnant woman, probably the expression of some sort of fertility spirit. They provided their house floors with baked-in-place depressions, either as basins or hearths, and later with domed ovens of clay. As we’ve noted, the houses themselves were of clay or mud; one could almost say they were built up like a house-sized pot. Then, finally, the idea of making portable pottery itself appeared, although I very much doubt that the people of the Jarmo village discovered the art.
On the other hand, the old tradition of making flint blades and microlithic tools was still very strong at Jarmo. The sickle-blade was made in quantities, but so also were many of the much older tool types. Strangely enough, it is within this age-old category of chipped stone tools that we see one of the clearest pointers to a newer age. Many of the Jarmo chipped stone tools—microliths—were made of obsidian, a black volcanic natural glass. The obsidian beds nearest to Jarmo are over three hundred miles to the north. Already a bulk carrying trade had been established—the forerunner of commerce—and the routes were set by which, in later times, the metal trade was to move.
There are now twelve radioactive carbon “dates” from Jarmo. The most reasonable cluster of determinations averages to about 6750 ± 200 B.C., although there is a completely unreasonable range of “dates” running from 3250 to 9250 B.C.! If I am right in what I take to be “reasonable,” the first flush of the food-producing revolution had been achieved almost nine thousand years ago.