The grant is intended to enable the final publication of the Neolithic sites of Tell Magzalia, Tell Sotto and Kültepe (Iraq) which will be in the form of a co-edited book by Nikolaï O. Bader, Olivier Aurenche and the grantee, Marie Le Mière, entitled “Ancient Farmers of the Sinjar Plain”. These three sites are located in Northern Iraq at the foot of the Djebel Sinjar, near the modern town of Tell Afar, between 3 and 8 kms from each other. They were investigated as part of the Archaeological Expedition of the Moskow Institute of Archaeology in Iraq (Russian Academy of Sciences) which centred on the site of Yarim Tepe. N.O. Bader excavated Tell Magzalia, Tell Sotto and Kültepe between 1971 and 1980.
Northern Iraq is poorly documented as far as the Neolithic period is concerned. While
the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic is represented at the sites of Qermiz Dere and Nemrik, Tell
Magzalia is one of the very few late Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites known in this area and the only one to have been excavated. Together with Tell Sotto and Kültepe, it provides a sequence spanning the late Pre-Pottery Neolithic to Pottery Neolithic periods. These periods are key to understanding Neolithization in the Near East and are marked by the appearance of pottery, by new developments in food production strategies and by major shifts in the stone tool industry. This is one of the only sequences available that permits investigation into the origin of the Hassuna culture, which was one of the first ceramic cultures in the Near East.
The sites of Tell Magzalia, Tell Sotto and Kültepe were first published in 1989 in Russian by N. O. Bader. Since then, new excavations in Northern Syria and South-East Anatolia, have offered more information on this period, providing abundant comparative material. The final publication, which will be in English, will be a revision of the initial study in light of these recent discoveries and will be prepared in collaboration with N.O. Bader, the director of the excavations, and several researchers involved in these recent investigations. In addition, the volume will provide new data and include detailed studies by specialists, specifically in the field of zooarchaeology, obsidian analyses, lithic technology, lithic use-wear and ceramology. The new data and new approaches that will be featured in this volume will contribute largely to this revision.
Neolithization in the Near East was a long process, lasting from the tenth to the seventh millennium BC. The main focus has been on the crucial beginning of agriculture and herding but the innovations and changes which occurred in the following phases of the Neolithic, though less “revolutionary” were of utmost importance to the evolution of Neolithic societies, as demonstrated by the seminal research that has developed in the last twenty years.
The appearance of pottery, long thought to be essential to the process of neolithization, has turned out to be the last but not the least important of a number of phenomena spurred by the development of the Neolithic. In fact, its appearance marked the introduction of a major technological innovation, which would have impacts on material issues like food processing, but also on social ones, as identity marker, and symbolic ones in the long term. Concerning food production, with the adoption of pottery, hunting was practically abandoned and herding became the predominant form of animal exploitation. Together with the development of nomadic herding, these transformations might have induced social changes by dividing groups into producers and consumers. The flint industry also changed drastically during this time, and especially in the types of raw materials used. There was a major decrease of exogenous materials, which were replaced by lower quality local materials, while the big blade industry so characteristic of the earlier Neolithic was abandoned and replaced by small blades and flake industries.
The only window into the Pre-Pottery to Pottery Neolithic transition of Northern Iraq
(end of the 8th millennium - 2nd half of the 7th millennium BC) and its transformations can be ound in the archaeological sequences at the sites of Tell Magzalia, Tell Sotto and Kül Tepe in the Sinjar region. These sites represent a unique documentation because this area was not much investigated in the past and it is for the last twenty years out of the field of research, situation which will hardly change in a short future. At Tell Magzalia, three different phases display the development of a late Pre-Pottery Neolithic village whereby the architecture transformed from small simple three-space rectangular houses to large pluri-cellular ones. Preserved in the last phase of this period is an extension of the village and, remarkably, a large retaining wall. This retaining wall may have also been defensive as suggested by the presence of two possible towers, a very rare architectural feature during this period in the Near East. Tell Sotto is a Pottery Neolithic site and its archaeological sequence covers the entire Proto-Hassuna period as well as the transition into the Archaic Hassuna period. The architectural remains point to the storage function of certain spaces and the presence of artisanal activities. Kül Tepe, a smaller site, represents only the later Proto-Hassuna period. Its architecture is very comparable with that of Tell Sotto but does not suggest the presence of diversified activities.
To complete the first study of Tell Magzalia, Tell Sotto and Kül Tepe carried out by N. Bader in 1989, detailed analyses were conducted particularly on key elements such as pottery, animal exploitation and lithic technology, so as to get good sets of data to help the interpretation of the sites and comparisons. A large part of the excavated material is stored in the Archaeological Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Moskow, which made these new analyses possible.
Many questions concerning pottery have been examined. Particularly worth mentioning is the beginning of pottery in the Sinjar area: was it a local development, an importation of a specific technique into the region or the result of the settlement of populations using this pottery? Can the initial stages of Hassuna pottery be found in the Tell Sotto sequence? In fact this site provides pottery assemblages that span the period from the Proto-Hassuna to the Archaic Hassuna which witnessed the development of painted pottery that would become the main cultural feature in Mesopotamia until the end of Ubaid period. An other important question is the presence of imports attested by chemical analyses, which though rare, show links with rather distant regions.
The new zooarchaeological study carried out focused on management strategies and followed the evolution of animal exploitation across sequences and to question the possible complementarity of the two contemporary sites, Tell Sotto and Kül Tepe.