Aswadia
A Neolithic archaeological culture of the 9th and especially the 8th millennium BC is known as Aswadien . Chr., Which can be grasped in a wide area around Damascus . Its name is derived from a settlement mound, Tell Aswad , in which excavations were carried out from 1971 and again from 2001 to 2006. The corresponding remains do not, as initially assumed (de Contenson), go back to the Pre-Ceramic Neolithic A , but only to the early Pre-Ceramic Neolithic B (PPNA or PPNB). The cultures of the Sultania in southern Palestine and of Mureybetia on the central Euphrates existed around the same time as the Aswadia .
The settlement in Tell Aswad, excavated by Danielle Stordeur and George Willcox from 2001 to 2006, coexisted with Mureybet IV and is the oldest known Neolithic settlement in Damascus. The first settlement took place between 9300 and 8600 BC. The main settlement, however, only emerged in the middle PPNB.
In addition to sunken houses, the domestication of food plants and goats , complex burial rituals are characteristic of the culture. Sheep was also kept from the north .
literature
- Danielle Stordeur : Neolithic plastered skulls from Tell Aswad (Syria). A funerary tradition in the Near East , in: Nuria Sanz, Bernardo T. Arriaza, Vivien G. Standen (Eds.): The Chinchorro culture. A comparative perspective, the archeology of the earliest human mummification , UNESCO, Paris 2014, pp. 177–196.
- Marie-Claire Cauvin : L'Aswadien: Réévaluation de sa mise en évidence , in: Syria 83 (2006) 31–38.
- Henri de Contenson: L'Aswadien, un nouveau faciès du neolithique syrien , in: Paléorient 15.1 (1989) 259-262.
Remarks
- ^ Alan H. Simmons: The Neolithic Revolution in the Near East. Transforming the Human Landscape , University of Arizona Press, 2007, p. 88.
- ^ Henri de Contenson: L'Aswadien, un nouveau faciès du néolithique syrien , in: Paléorient 15 (1989) 259–262 ( online ) and Ders .: Nouvelles données sur Tell Aswad et l'Aswadien (Damascène) , in: Syria 84 (2007) 307 f. ( online ).