Exploring the Roots of Mesopotamian Civilization: Excavations at Tell Zeidan, Syria

I use to see he's a speaker Oh Peter sign is known to everybody and probably doesn't really need much introduction less but infusion is some introduction but that's why I wanna see him sign is a director of Institute and the soul of Houston archaeology and languages and relations at the englischer Chicago he received his BA with honors in archaeology from Yale University in 1978 and his Houston has a holiday from University of Pennsylvania in 1988 since 1981 he has conducted excavations on sorbus in Arizona and Mexico and for Tian is here he has been a National Foundation graduate fellow a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey it boasts the dr. Sonja institution imprisonment scholar is full of the Macon Research Chair and healthy Howard from Brown University from 1997 to 1998 professors - their main research interests that focused on their in Oakland a very customizations in years and there are Calvillo engine trade Ollie's he has also conducted research on the economic organization of state societies practice pressurization pneumatics assistant systems and zoo archeology if either himself in a new field that he mastered on the site and also brought with me nor Institute this extra need by establishing our first go to archeology lab and training any students without enemies in his popularity as world archaeology course he has written over 4,200 objects and book chapters and reuse if the major who carry the word system by aspera colonies and is actually group is Benina published in 1909 and contains most of these theoretical insights State of the State and Hortense his most recent edited volume the archeology of the founders comparative perspectives published by Sullivan School of Iranian American research and his Co edited book chieftains and various sensing and use the organizational dynamics of complexity are the influences for social complexity of the three four feet and fourth millennium BC years from 1992 to 1987 he directed excavation at late ability to route about 4,000 to a very 100 to see the site of algae Hammond in the Fraser River Valley of southeastern 190 was a major source of news heretical insights his excavations since 2008 at his insight does a London Syria have shown as they don't is indeed an excellent and promising increase to each site where he can initialize is ethical insight on the dynamics involved in the formation of social complexity that live to the formation of early estates in there is important tendency and see repeated here about his new stories at this important sites so instead join me to welcome man thank you for the introduction and it's it's a real pleasure for me to have a chance to to speak with you this evening I'd like to talk about the the excavation project the joint Syrian American excavations at the site of tells a Don and really what I'm hoping to convey to you this evening is a sense of the potential of the site that we're really at the beginning of what I hope will be a long term process where I hope to be able to work for the next 12 years at this site I believe it has tremendous potential for giving us new views of the beginnings of complexity in the Near East as most of you probably know the the area of Mesopotamia is generally considered the heartland of cities it's the place where the first urban literate civilizations developed and this took place in southern Mesopotamia we have the world's earliest known cities but I want to call your attention to the fact that there are two clusters of sites here one in southern Mesopotamia and then a second one up in the north in in what's called either Upper Mesopotamia or the Jazira region the or the dry farming zone in contrast with the irrigation zone of southern Mesopotamia now the world's first cities develop in the rook period generally speaking as a BAS in between 4,000 and 3100 BC this is the time of the first cities the emergence of the state as a form of political organization the first kingship and at the very end of the period the invention of writing what's interesting and important is that every one of these first cities in southern Mesopotamia these first cities of the rook period when you dig down to the bottom of it it sits on top of a large town dating to an enigmatic period called the ebayid period so the obeying period really is the key if we want to understand the origins of the first cities and state societies in the rook period we cannot hope to do so without understanding its antecedents in the obaid period and a lot is going on there what's important is that the rook cities and states did not arise by a kind of parthenogenesis that instead they had very deep roots in the obaid period and the abeyance sees the first settlement that we can document of southern Mesopotamia the first irrigation based temple towns the first evidence for social stratification and the emergence of elites and political leaders whether we want to call them Chiefs or some other term it really seems that the beginnings of political centralization economic stratification and large population concentrations all that happens in the evade period now I was using the adjective enigmatic to describe the Ubaid because really our knowledge of the obey it comes in bits and pieces it's very hard to put together a picture of what obeyed society was actually like and that is for several reasons the first is that the Ubaid period since it is so early we're talking about roughly 5,500 through 4000 BC the remains of those cities are going to be very deeply buried deeply buried either by the eluvian from the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers and deeply buried by having millennia of later cities and occupations on top of them so I've included this slide here this is actually a picture of the excavation by Leonard Woolley of the royal cemetery of ore and you can see how far down they had to dig just to get to levels dating to about 2500 BC and what I want to point out to you is the Obey it is 2,000 years earlier than that and that should give you an idea of why it's so difficult to get an actual archeological picture of the Ubaid period because it is so deeply buried that it can really in most cases only be studied in very narrow exposures but in very deep narrow soundings now what we do know about the obey it in southern Mesopotamia mostly comes from two or three sites perhaps the most important of them is Airy Dew which in Mesopotamian mythology is viewed as the first city actually rather than or Garrity was considered the Euro earliest city and it was excavated in the late 40s by Seaton Lloyd and Fuad safar and what they found was the first really good evidence for what a new Bayon temple town might have been like but they only at were able to find certain parts of it they were able to find a community cemetery which is quite interesting the obaid period is the first time we have community cemeteries where people are no longer buried in their houses but are buried in a large communal group and that tells us that a new form of social identity had occurred that people identified themselves as citizens of a town rather than as members of a given household so that right away is a very important finding the other finding is this very it's a photomontage actually but it's a very long sequence of temples at era doom so we have public ritual architecture new forms of community identity the Ubaid has a very distinctive complex of material culture and we have some wonderful examples of this in our Mesopotamian gallery and if you get a chance I'd urge you to take a look at it it's in the chronology case on the Left when you're when you're going inside there's a very distinctive style of house architecture called a tripartite house these very unusual baked clay sickles that we'll use to cut reeds and wheat because Mesopotamia doesn't have Flint so they had to make their sickles out of very hard on the stoneware fired clay very distinctive style of sort of greenish pottery made on a tour net or a slow wheel and decorated with them what British archaeologists like to call chocolate covered colored paint it sounds better than brown and these very unusual bent mushroom headed nails that are called Muller's we have no real idea what they were used for we think they may have been used as a kind of a pestle with the rounded head used to grind things up but we actually don't really know but in any case it's a very unusual artifact and the comp all of these things are very very distinctive to the obaid culture and very recognizable I pointed out the temples the temples are really interesting because the Oh Bayon period sees the beginning of a tradition of public ritual architecture that becomes the Sumerian tradition this is the roots of Sumerian civilization and the distinctive elements of these ebayid temples are they also have a tripartite plan with a large central room and two banks of side rooms there or oriented so the corners are oriented to the cardinal points they have an altar in an offering table and then they have this really distinctive niched and buttress style of architecture and I'll be coming back to that in a little bit and you can see from the scale that these temples grown to be quite large and Lloyd and safar were able to trace the whole evolution of this tradition of temple building all the way back to a very simple beginning now what's neat is that this tradition of temple building which was in place in its fully developed form by around 4000 BC lasted easily for the next three and a half to four thousand years until the very end of the Mesopotamian tradition it's a very very deeply rooted form of sacred architecture and it begins a new band one of the key social developments that's taking place as part of this emergence of towns large towns of 10 to 12 hectares a hectare would be a hundred meters by 100 meters think of two football fields right next to each other would be sort of about one hectare so these towns these temple towns were about between 10 and 15 hectares and they had the temples inside them but at this same time period we see the beginnings of social and economic differentiation it's the beginning of societies division into rich and poor it's a major change from the earlier Neolithic period which was where people's economic status was pretty much equal but in the obaid period this is excavations by an Iraqi archaeologist named sabaha Buju seen at a site Kotel obadah in central Iraq and he was able to expose about 80% of a village dating to the obaid period and what I want to point out to you is first that standard bade style of house right that I pointed out that tripartite house but look at the size difference in this house a here is seven times the size of the smallest house in the settlement house a also has a very large concentration of all these exotic raw materials and work stone goods and here's the neat part these houses were built and rebuilt over a period of about a hundred and fifty years and throughout that time that largest house in the settlement remained the largest house in this settlement and that smallest poorest house remained the poorest house so what that's telling us then is that not only had society differentiated into richer and poorer members but those wealthier members of society were able to pass on their wealth and their higher social status to their children and their grandchildren so that first takes place in the Ubaid and that is laying the foundation for the very very market social stratification that we see in the first cities of the rook period and the early dynastic period we some of the evidence for these wealth and power differences can be seen in what anthropologists would like to call prestige goods which are things that are made from exotic raw materials and then worked by master craftsmen so you have these stone pallets these are from a cycle Tepe Gowron northern Iraq and these very fancy mace heads as well that were made from stone that was imported from sometimes from hundreds of kilometers away and worked for weeks or months into these very elaborate forms so you start finding large numbers of those prestige goods associated with the big houses in these settlements of the Ubaid period now we have very little evidence for the emergence of political leadership and one of the few artifacts that gets cited as possible evidence is this this guy who's giving us the full monty here and what he's holding is a mace and remember I showed you mace heads as a prestige go-to symbol of power and this very elaborate model done necklace around him so it's a very distinctive Southern Mesopotamian style of figuring they're called Ophidian or reptilian figurines but this seems to be a person with some kind of a leadership position this was found that era do I believe in southern Mesopotamia in the Abay period so when you take it all together there are a lot of major dramatic social transformations happening in the Ubaid period and one of the most interesting things that occurs during the Ubaid period is that this bad culture which originates in southern Mesopotamia in the orange area on the map during the waiter in bayit period that obeyed culture spreads from southern Mesopotamia in almost every direction it spreads north into northern Iraq and then west all the way across to the Mediterranean who bayad pottery and obaid related settlements are found all the way down the western shore of the Persian Gulf as far as the Straits of Hormuz so there is an invade horizon that spreads and extends about 2,000 kilometers across the Near East sharing the same pottery styles and some other aspects of abated culture so week it's fair to call it a horizon it wasn't a single state it wasn't a single political unit but it was a shared culture so what's interesting then is how the obaid starts in the South early on in the obaid 1 & 2 period there's the babe culture and southern and the Halawa culture in northern mesopotamia during the later who bathe debated three for it the obeyed three for continues in southern mesopotamia but then spreads into northern mesopotamia where it replaces the earlier holo so it spreads out and replaces the preceding local cultures now it seems to me that the best way to understand the obeyed is to excavate at one of those regional centers those temple towns where you would expect to see the most social differentiation where you would expect to see the evidence for political leadership and where you would expect to see evidence for public ritual architecture so all these developments of the made our best going to be studied at one of the regional centers the problem is for both political reasons and archaeological reasons it's very hard to study a temple town in southern iraq however it is possible to study those phenomena in Upper Mesopotamia in what's now the modern country of Syria where we have obeyed settlements and we have large abated towns without that problem of the massive Allu VA ssin from the Tigris and Euphrates River so that's why we're so interested in this site of tells Aegon this is a Google Earth image it shows you a number of things I'd like to point out first we have the Euphrates River this is the tub cut dam in North Syria and flowing north to south is the belief river it originates in the Haram plain Iran of course is known from the patriarchal narratives from the book of Genesis it's also Haran is care I the scene of for those of you are into gross stuff as I am the the defeat of the Roman general crass us by the Parthian swear they killed him by pouring molten gold down his throat that was much later of course I'm dealing with a pre-medical period anyway so the belief River intersects the Euphrates and that's important because what it means is tells a Don is located at the juncture of two of the most important trade routes in the ancient Near East the Euphrates would lead you toward the Mediterranean going north all along the Bali River Valley would bring you into the mountains of eastern Anatolia which is where the copper sources were and semi-precious stones and lumber so many of the very important raw materials would have been accessible by that Bali crivit trade route now explorations of the Bali began in the mid 20s and really accelerated in the 1930s with Max malwan who was the husband of Agatha Christie and Agatha Christie talks about this beautifully and her memoir come tell me how you live which I really recommend to all of you and there's this wonderful scene in it where Agatha is talking with her husband and he's saying oh you know I'm thinking of shifting my focus from tell Brock and chegar Bazaar to perhaps the Bali and then she says the Bali guy sang innocently and it goes whacking great tells all along it which is a bit of an exaggeration but it's serious okay so here's a close-up of that Google Earth image and it shows you the importance of this location what I want to point out to you is that there has almost always been a city that the confluence of the Balika and the Euphrates and that in and of itself tells you how important this area was for trade and communication it also shows beautifully in this image that it's an irrigated River Valley tells a Don is located in a place where there's not enough rainfall to sustain agriculture on its own so you have to have irrigation what you can see is we're on the edge of the deserts or well arid steppe but you know it's pretty indistinguishable from desert once you get outside of the River Valley it's very very Airy but in the River Valley there's very fertile agriculture so what we have then is the modern city of Raqqa the third the second millennium city of Tel BL which is known as to tool and the time of the Mari letters the early to mid second millennium BC and then just across the Bali the earliest centre regional centre at the site as it tells they done so it has always been a nodal point rich for agriculture and very well situated for trade now the site of the so the history of major settlements in this site really goes back to about 5,800 BC with tells a done but it continued over the millennia through to Tobia to tool in the cell usage Hellenistic times are this site of Raqqa was called colony coast and later leon topless in Byzantine times and then Raqqa in early Islamic times the word Raqqa means more ass or swamp and it's actually a very accurate name the high point of Raqqa occurred in the 8th century and early ninth century when under the Abbasid Caliphate where first the caliph al Monsour built a very large palace complex there and then the caliph harun al-rashid and we know up from he figures very prominently in the Arabian Nights 1001 nights he actually turned Raqqa into his capital he al Monsour had built a very large city right next door to Raqqa which he called al refika which means the companion and al refika and Raqqa merged into one another and became quite a powerful place a wonderful aerial photograph showing you the you or horseshoe-shaped city of owl refika right next to Raqqa what's neat is if you look at the bottom of the picture you can see the Euphrates River originally the Euphrates went right up to the bottom of the horseshoe and the river has shifted course about a kilometer to the south in the 1200 years since the time of Al Monsour and Harun al-rashid but it was Raqqa was a major urban settlement with massive city walls beautiful ornate gates this is the Baghdad gate of Raqqa this is a very large palace complex called caserole bonnet Raqqa was one of the leading centres of the masterpieces of Islamic art and creativity in the 9th the 8th 9th 10th and 12th and 13th centuries until its destruction by the Mongols but most of you will probably have heard of luster where there's this extraordinarily beautiful Islamic pottery that was made in Raqqa these figurines from the met in New York also the work of master craftsmen from Raqqa all this was destroyed by the Mongols in the 14th century and the area was abandoned and became nomadic Bedouin territory for many centuries until in about the late 1800s the Ottomans slowly began to reassert state control and slowly began to expand the borders of the zone as against the desert so this is the modern city of Raqqa which really only dates back to the 19th century when it was settled by Bedouins and sir patients from the Caucasus actually so it's a fascinating place and it's kind of a lesson that you shouldn't it looks pretty undistinguished today but in fact it was the capital of the entire Abbas Cayla fit for a brief shining moment this show just to show you some of the better when people who live in this area it's that town the area has very strong veteran character still and it's really a very manifesting just the strong tradition of hospitality and our our friends from the rocket museum and in the community of Raqqa were tremendously hospitable to us in the joint Syrian American expedition and they really laid out they were very very kind to us we lived in our dig house last season was the Zeki LR Suzy elementary school which we you know is very nice to have the accommodations there until we can we're hoping to build a big house hopefully starting this summer we were there for about two and a half weeks before I found out that Zeki Allah or Suzie is the founder and theoretician of the Baath Party so that's why the the school was named after him so tells a dom is five kilometers east of the modern city of Raqqa and as I mentioned one of the reasons for digging there first of all the most important is there no later occupations on the site tells a don was abandoned in 4000 BC and we think that people moved across the river to this site to found the site of two to lortell via so what that means is you scrape your foot on the surface of that mound and you are in 4,000 BC which is a remarkable thing it's highly unusual it's not like having to dig through 30 feet of alluvium or 70 feet of later cultural deposits as you might have to in other sites so it gives us a chance to expose a broad area of a you bayad temple town in a way that we simply couldn't do at most other sites and at the same time it allows us to explore the local origins of social complexity in Upper Mesopotamia now I want to emphasize this was a joint expedition a joint syrian-american project that our syrian co directors are the directors of the rocket museum in 2008 we worked with Inasa Hobart and 2009 with Mohammed Sauron from the rocket museum tells Adon itself is located on the just on the east bank of the baleen river and you can see these very very rich irrigated river terraces planted in cotton and cotton and wheat I think by and large these are two of our excavation areas and use this picture just to give you an idea of the scale of the site tells a Don consists of three mounds and this is just the southernmost of the three here you can see we were looking at the southern mound here we're looking from the east but this gives you this Google Earth image well first of all it shows you that our map is reasonably accurate which is always kind of a relief but you can see that structure of three mounds of South Mountain Northwest mounted the Northeast Mound and in the middle a lower town now that long thing sticking out is actually a raised irrigation canal that was built by scooping out the lower town of tells a Don so much of the the the lower town has been destroyed by modern agricultural development and that's one of the reasons why the Syrian government was willing to allow foreign archeologists to work there was because the site is threatened by modern agricultural development and here's the belief River what's left of the bollock River right to the west of the site and amazingly you can see the steppe trench that Abbas alleys are dead done you can see it from 600 miles in outer space on this spot satellite imagery so that that's quite impressive we actually have made an impression on the site all right at the site we the May occupational periods that we've come up with our step trench and other excavations have shown us that the main occupation periods we know of so far are the hull off the you bayad what's called the lake calculus one and the way calculate ik two and each has its own very distinctive style of pottery now I should emphasize we have not reached virgin soil we have not reached the bottom of the site I would be delighted if it turned out there was a Neolithic component underlying the hull off and it's something that I hope in this and coming seasons that we'll be able to get down to the very base of the site but for now what's important is that these are the key periods in monitoring and tracing the origins of social complexity most notably the obeyed period and those following periods the way calculus ik one and two we face many challenges excavating the site not the least of which was the local fauna the workmen took to taking their breaks by sitting in rubber goofus or baskets that we use for clearing soil because the rubber basket would protect them from the the local scorpions one of the first things we tried to do was to track the occupation of the site by looking at what remains were there on the surface and we did that by making controlled surface collections down the side of the mound and transects radiating out in all directions from the top of the mound and each of these circles measures exactly one hundred square meters and we picked up all the pottery in there and many of the people in this room were responsible for sorting through it and here what we can see is going from these huge amounts of pottery collected sorting it down to diagnostics rims bases handles painted shirts and on that basis figuring out based on where the pottery was lying what circle it was lying and how big the site was in different time periods and this is an example looking at one of our transects down the side of the mound and what you can see is this transect was at the top of the mound moving down the mound and this was at the bottom and these colored lines show you what the how much pottery there was from each different period what's neat about this is as you move down the mound the peaks of pottery correspond exactly to LC 2 LC 1 abate and hollow so the material from these different time periods is eroding out of the side of the mound really in exactly the places where you'd expect in the order you'd expect it will be very disturbing if you had a LOF material coming out at the top of the mound but fortunately we don't our best evidence for the secrets of the site comes from the excavation of the steppe trench and this is a Vasa all these are Devils in charge of these excavations and that recovered a really reliable stratigraphic sequence of the site and this is the stratigraphic section from Abbas as excavations and what we have in the middle are something like 6 meters over 18 feet of well stratified ube a deposit transitioning down into the Halawa at the bottom and as you can see the Halawa is continuing down we also collected a series of radiocarbon dates using what's called AMS accelerator mass spectrometry which lets you date very small pieces of charcoal even individual grains of wheat and that's really valuable because you can get really precise dates and it's wonderful because the sequence that we have as we go from the hell off to the LC to just perfectly clusters in a nice gradual transition from about 5,800 BC down to about 4,000 BC and at that point around 4000 BC that's when tells a dumb was abandoned so I just want to briefly go through what are some of the funds that we have been making the pottery is of course extremely important to us as a chronological indicator to tell us when the site was occupied and to help us know where we are and what the cultural connections are so this is that LC 2 phase of 4200 to about 4000 BC and this is contemporaneous with the other Oriental Institute excavations in Syria that Clemens Reichel is conducting at the very important site of Hamilcar so we have a lot of similarities to hammock art to the east and then these potsherds here actually relate very closely to the earliest occupation at the site of heavy that I dug just to the north in Turkey so tells Adon has cultural connections in many directions this is just drawings showing you the very distinctive shapes of the pottery in this lc2 period we also found burials these were from Abbas as excavations in operation six here at the top of the South mound and the burials had some very interesting kind of body piercing evidence these labret sore lip plugs that were found in a number of the burials from this lc2 period so it's a way of marking who you are personal ornamentation one of the nicest funds that we made office was made by Kate Grossman is of this gabled stone seal with a really beautiful design on it first of all it's extremely large this is an example of a prestige good it's made of an exotic raw material this red stone it's carved by a master stone carver and the motif on it is quite interesting it shows up there's this border with these protrusions on it I don't know if they're flames or horns on not an art historian and then a servant a Red Deer shown on the inside of it now why is that interesting why do I suggest that this is an elite good well it's sighs its the scarcity of the raw materials the workmanship would all indicate that what's really neat is that in fact you find very close parallels 400 kilometers to these the Tepe Galera we're not identical but very very similar and what it suggests is that there was a shared set of symbols or possibly a shared a leave culture of this newly emergent group of wealthy powerful people in this LC to society and I've been asking around trying to find more parallels and Holly Pittman at the University of Pennsylvania Martella frangipani at the University of Rome Mitchell Rothman at wide-area University they've pointed out a number of extremely interesting similarities so that this seal from art salon Tepe it's that same kind of gabled roof top shape than profile with the drilling through it the same motif of that border with a servant in the middle of it and then in ox RI og Buick area in central Anatolia again a very similar seal motif and of course not just the one from Tepig our that I showed you but a number of other ones so this is really neat tells a Don is connected with people of wealth and power in Anatolia and in Upper Mesopotamia so it's clear that the emergence of complex societies and a Leeds was taking place across a broad area of the Near East and this is something that we really need to study and understand much better we also know that this same period of the lc2 period sees the beginnings of metallurgy we found a chair or a blowpipe that was used in smelting copper and we found actual fragments of a copper bowl from that same period and just as an example of how this blowpipe would work in our Egyptian gallery we have a nice old Kingdom carved limestone statue that shows a coppersmith blowing through a blowpipe - into a furnace heating a crucible to smelt copper so this is a very important technology and it first began in this fifth millennium BC and it's connected with the emergence of these towns and a Leitz in the calculative period beneath that we have the lc1 or late calculated one period and this appeared we really don't know a lot about this is sort of intermediate between the obeyed period and that lc2 period one of our students here Michael Fisher is going to be doing his dissertation research to really try and understand the social organization and economy of this period much better its distinguished by this kind of Flint scrape bowl that resembles things that are called Joba bowls in Southeast Anatolia and something like 50 percent of the pottery that we find are these Flint's great beaded lip bowls we also find domestic architecture from that period complete with these large pithily buried in the courtyards of houses with grain scoops found inside them they buried them up to their the top of the neck and then covered over the top so would have been a way to hide the grain that would have been the wealth and necessary for the survival of the families in that household so we're getting a chance to look at domestic architecture from and households from that this lc1 period we also found evidence for ceiling use of administrative activity and this this our one example but it's a really nice one it shows a striding figure with an animal behind them and again I'll admit I'm not an art historian but I was struck by at least is reminiscent of this seal from kep Agora and the musculature on the legs is similar and the position of the legs and the position of the animal behind the the striding figure are all quite similar we also found large numbers of scrunched up pieces of ceiling clay you can see the finger impressions still on them from where they were scrunched into persons hand so there was large large caches of sealing clay that were present at the site in this period so there was a lot of record-keeping activity taking place and I would hope and anticipate that we'll find a lot more ceilings in the coming seasons and then there are these bizarre molars which I mentioned were typical of the abated period what we never expected is that the use of these molars continued into this lc1 or like alkalotic one period and we found the number of fragments now and even one more or less complete example of these mowers the weird thing about them is this kind of crosshatch in size decoration or treatment of the rounded head which again I don't quite understand it but it seems to be pretty frequent we have three or four examples of it what's important is it shows that the lc1 culture tells a Don developed very organically out of the earlier obaid culture and very tantalizingly we found a piece of a niche to buttress building in this lc1 period probably a public building of some sort it always happens that you find it with it just a bit of it sticking out of the Balch and you know you're going to have to go back and dig underneath it but this again would be continuity with that ebayid style of niche and buttress architecture that they used on public buildings and temples in the obeyed period so what we would anticipate is that as we continue down further we will be I would hope we will find more evidence of this sort getting to the Ubaid period one of the nice things that we've been able to find is the transition between the obeyed and the lc1 period that this is something that has not been found in very many places and it really lets us gives us a chance to understand the gradual nature of the evolution of civilization in this area what I want to point out to you is remember I mentioned the LC one pottery is very characteristically these Flint scraped bowls that's the stuff you see across the top there but you're also finding these chocolate painted bayad styles of pottery and very specific styles of decoration like this and this seem to characterize this transitional phase so one of the things we're working on is trying to be able to identify that transitional phase between the obeyed and the LC one by looking at the pottery and when we track the percentage of the Flint's great bowls they drop off and the percentage of painted bowls increase so when you're in the obeyed you have none of the Flint's great bowls and massive amounts of painted pottery in the LC one you have exactly the reverse so the point where those two lines crisscross is that transitional point and we're very interested in finding out more about how the you bathe developed into this LC bond culture the Obey in itself as I said we have six meters of in situ intact bayad stratigraphy and it's characterized by this really wonderfully brown painted pottery a lot of it is geometric shapes but there also is an fascinating tradition of naturalistic art that we really weren't anticipating finding this was on my title slide it's three different kinds of animals very clear from the way they're depicted you can see their hooves this is an ostrich which was native to the Syrian steppe so this kind of naturalistic decoration is very unusual we also found this motif of the gazelle perhaps or in imax with an AI motif you can see the AI motifs all over in these potsherds but this particular configuration is interesting by having the animal with the eye located between its legs and gene evans from our crew was an art historian pointed out that she found a potsherd and just the small potsherd you can see on the shirt that exact same motif there the legs of the gazelle and again the eye in between them so it's something that had some kind of symbolic importance there and it's an entire tradition that's in parallel with the geometric designs so that it's a period of very great creativity it's clearly part of the Ubaid culture but this kind of naturalistic art is very much a local north upper Mesopotamian tradition very different from what you might see in southern Mesopotamia we also have in the obaid monumental public architecture at least bits and pieces of it here this is the operation one section and you can see this large mud brick wall three and a half meters wide preserved at least one and a half meters high and extended out for more than five or six meters before it eroded down the side of the mound we were able to collect radiocarbon samples from right up against the wall and those radiocarbon samples date to about 5000 BC we also were able to recover ube it houses a large complex of kilns used for baking of firing pottery and kiln wasters over fired ceramics so we know that there was a ceramic production taking place at site in the obaid period and we found figurines and what's interesting is the style of the figurines is not the same as that southern Mesopotamian style but instead it's a local North Mesopotamian style of figurine and because it's the Oriental Institute we have to find sling bullets were sort of contractually obligated to find sling bullets and we were in one in operation aid we found more than 1,000 of these things in one single deposit so it's it's really quite remarkable that would kill a lot of gazelles we also found them this is something that really excites me about the potential of the site we finally started finding some of these obeyed prestige goods and they're broken but they're definitely there this is a fragment of one of those stone pallets and if you look up top you can see a complete example it's perfectly clear what it is the upturn sides in parallel opened on the end made of an exotic stone ground and polished we found this very unusual rod with a hook on the end made out of carved steel tight or chloride or soapstone which the sources of chloride are near Dr Bakr in eastern Turkey about 200-300 kilometers away we call that one the backscratcher because we had no idea what it was and even more remarkable a polished obsidian Bowl and you know obsidian is a very very brittle volcanic natural glass to carve obsidian into a bowl is a really difficult undertaking the obsidian came from 400 kilometres away probably the Lake Vaughn area and it was worked by someone very skillful so all of these are starting to show up in our Roubaix deposits and it so state yes this really is a society that has prestige goods and almost certainly has some level of social differentiation beneath the obeyed with our earliest levels we've reached so far date to the Halal period and they're characterized by this just absolutely beautiful painted handmade pottery with a very characteristic motif of the hayloft period or what's called beu crania or bull heads and you can see some a schematic view cranium here another one here and in the upper picture on the second row second from the left you more abou crania very characteristic of the hull of we also have the Venus if tells a Don this miniature female figurine and hull off seals which are very distinctive to this period these are also made of this one is made of carved soapstone or claw right which again would have been the long distance import we found this strainer jar perhaps for beer or perhaps for yogurt and a hematite mace head drilled through all from the hull off period so there's something going on in the halluf period that the beginnings of something that is really tantalizing to ask just how complex was a loft society we also found reasonable amounts of obsidian this volcanic glass was about 5% of the chipped stone that we found at the site and a student and at the University of California did an analysis of some of the obsidian samples using a inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry to identify the elemental composition of the obsidian and track it back to its source area and what she was able to do was she was able to identify at least one very tight cluster of chemical composition or chemical fingerprints that matches nemrut dog which is a volcano on the south shores of Lake Vaughn in Turkey that's pretty neat but I also want to point out this purple oval which tracks very closely to the chemical composition of Lake Sevan which is up in Armenia so it looks like the obsidian that reached Jose Don was not coming from central Anatolia but rather was coming from eastern Anatolia and inside the oval you can see that triangle the volcano of nemrud dagh and then that lake in the upper right-hand portion of the slide is Lake Sevan in in Armenia so it's possible that at least some of the obsidium was coming from really even further afield in Lake von but what I want to emphasize that is a done really was at the juncture of these trade routes and these trade routes were being used to bring very precious raw materials over long distances to make prestige goods for the emerging elites at the site we've also been studying the Archaea botany of tells Aegon and the zuo archaeology we're recovering evidence for the cultivation of barley we want to try and understand how their farming system work and how irrigation agriculture worked at the site we're also obviously doing other work like conservation of pottery and the analysis of the chipped stone tools this is dr. Elizabeth Healy from the University of Manchester so at the end of our first two season basically what we have are a bunch of hints we have tantalizing evidence that argues for the tremendous research potential of this site as a way of really getting at some serious answers about the roots of civilization the origins of the first urban societies of the rook period the origins of those societies their roots in the obeying we have a complete stratigraphic sequence over almost 2,000 years at the site we know it was a regional center we know that from our controlled surface collections and from our excavations it was 12 and a half hectares which makes it as being if not bigger than that site of Airi do in southern Mesopotamia which is the type site for the U Bayon this was a major town we have evidence for craft specialization and long-distance trade evidence for prestige Goods and most of all we have every reason to believe that as we continue at this site we're going to be able to make serious inroads into understanding the origins and the spread of complex societies in the Ubaid period in both upper and lower Mesopotamia and I want to thank the Syrian director-general of monuments and museums I'd like to thank our funding from the National Science Foundation the Oriental Institute and generosity of private donors and most of all I want to thank the staff of that tells they'd on excavation crew who are just a remarkable bunch of people and a privilege to work with so thank you very much you

Channel: The Oriental Institute

Views: 110,170

Rating: 4.7414298 out of 5

Keywords: Ubaid, Mesopotamia, Syria, Tell, Zeidan, archaeology, Oriental, Institute, University, of, Chicago, Gil, Stein

Id: QHDPGUuAjIo

Length: 56min 42sec (3402 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 07 2010

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Exploring the Roots of Mesopotamian Civilization: Excavations at Tell Zeidan, Syria Gil Stein, Oriental Institute

The Ubaid period (6th-5th millennia BC) saw the first establishment of towns and villages across Mesopotamia. This period provides the first evidence for the emergence of political leadership, economic differences between rich and poor, irrigation-based economies, dominating regional centers or towns, and the development of temples in these centers. In this lecture, Gil Stein discusses recent excavations at the Ubaid-period site of Tell Zeidan in Syria and the expansion of Ubaid culture across Mesopotamia.