Homesteads on the Khabur: Tell Ziyadeh and Other Settlements

In 1994-1997, the Yale University Khabur Basin Project excavated Tell Ziyadeh on the Middle Khabur River of Northeastern Syria. This monograph describes two pioneering settlements: fifth millennium BC Ubaid and early third millennium. It discusses the research programme and strategies; reviews the modern and palaeoenvironments; and provides separate chapters describing the various excavation areas, as well as the ceramic, lithic, faunal and botanical remains found in them. Two chapters describe small-scale excavations at Mashnaqa and Kuran, sites with occupation histories paralleling Ziyadeh. The monograph concludes with a discussion of the immigration by fifth-millennium Ubaid settlers into a virgin landscape in the Khabur, and the gradual transition into a widespread Late Chalcolithic tradition. It provides a reconstruction of the realities of life in these small homesteads, which comprised a society of closely interacting settlements and remained viable for hundreds of years before moving elsewhere, as simultaneously as they had initially arrived.