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

I have the honor to introduce to you this evening's speaker. Gilles Stein is known to everybody and probably doesn't really need much introduction. But the introducer needs some introduction, but that's my honor. Gilles Stein is the director of the Oriental Institute and professor of Near Eastern Archaeology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He received his B.A. with honors in archaeology from Yale University in 1978 and his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988. Since 1981, he has conducted excavations and surveys in Arizona and New Mexico and Turkey and in Syria. Gilles has been a National Science Foundation graduate fellow, a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, a resident scholar at the School of American Research, and held a Howard Fellowship from Brown University from 1997 to 1998. Professor Stein's main research interests focus on the development of early civilizations in the Near East and the archaeology of ancient trade colonies. He has also conducted research on the economic organization of state societies. Craft specialization, neolithic subsistence systems, and zoo archaeology. In Latin itself, a major field that he mastered on the site and also brought with him to the Oriental Institute is expertise by establishing our first zoo archaeology lab and training many students in the lab and his popular zoo archaeology courses. Gilles has written over 40 journal articles, book chapters, and reviews. Gilles' major book, Rethinking the World System, Diaspora, Colonies, and Interaction in Europe and Spain, published in 1999, contains most of his theoretical insights on the eve of the emergence of the state and organism. His most recent edited volume, The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters, Comparative Perspectives, published by Santa Fe School of American Research, and his co-edited book, Chieftains and the Early Estates in the Near East, The Organizational Dynamics of Complexity, are major sources for social complexity of the 5th and 4th millennium BC Near East. From 1992 to 1997, he directed excavations at Late Chalcolithic Uruk about 4,000 to 3,100 BC, the site of Hajji Nabi in the Euphrates River Valley of southeast Turkey. While Hajji Nabi was a major source of Gilles' theoretical insights, his excavations since 2008 at his new site, Tal Zeydan in Syria, have shown that Zeydan is indeed an excellent and promising prehistoric site where he can contextualize his theoretical insights on the dynamics involved in the formation of socio-political complexity that led to the formation of early estates in the ancient Near East in the 4th millennium BC. And we will hear about his new discoveries at this important site. So please join me in welcoming Gilles. Thank you for the introduction and it's a real pleasure for me to have a chance to speak with you this evening. I'd like to talk about the excavation project, the joint Syrian-American excavations at the site of Tal Zeydan. 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 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 what's called either upper Mesopotamia or the Jazira region or the dry farming zone in contrast with the irrigation zone of southern Mesopotamia. Now, the world's first cities develop in the Uruk period. Generally speaking, as Abbas mentioned, between 4000 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 Uruk 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 Ubaid period. So, the Ubaid period really is the key. If we want to understand the origins of the first cities and state societies in the Uruk period, we cannot hope to do so without understanding its antecedents in the Ubaid period. And a lot is going on there. What's important is that the Uruk cities and states did not arise by a kind of Parthenogenesis. Instead, they had very deep roots in the Ubaid period. And the Ubaid 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 Ubaid period. Now, I was using the adjective enigmatic to describe the Ubaid, because really our knowledge of the Ubaid comes in bits and pieces. It's very hard to put together a picture of what Ubaid 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 4,000 BC, the remains of those cities are going to be very deeply buried. Deeply buried either by the alluviation 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 Ur. And you can see how far down they had to dig just to get to levels dating to about 2,500 BC. And what I want to point out to you is the Ubaid is 2,000 years earlier than that. And that should give you an idea of why it's so difficult to get an actual archaeological 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, in very deep, narrow soundings. Now what we do know about the Ubaid in southern Mesopotamia mostly comes from two or three sites. Perhaps the most important of them is Eridu, which in Mesopotamian mythology is viewed as the first city, actually, rather than Uruk. Eridu is considered the earliest city. And it was excavated in the late 40s by Seton Lloyd and Fuad Safar. And what they found was the first really good evidence for what an Ubaid temple town might have been like. But they only were able to find certain parts of it. They were able to find a community cemetery, which is quite interesting. The Ubaid 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 photo montage actually, but it's a very long sequence of temples at Eridu. 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 going inside. There's a very distinctive style of house architecture called a tripartite house. These very unusual baked clay sickles that were used to cut reeds and wheat, because Mesopotamia doesn't have flint. So they had to make their sickles out of very hard, almost stoneware-fired clay. Very distinctive style of sort of greenish pottery made on a tournette or a slow wheel and decorated with what British archaeologists like to call chocolate-colored paint. It sounds better than brown. And these very unusual bent, mushroom-headed nails that are called mullers. 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 we don't really know. But in any case, it's a very unusual artifact. And all of these things are very, very distinctive to the Ubaid culture and very recognizable. I pointed out the temples. The temples are really interesting because the Ubaid 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 Ubaid temples are they also have a tripartite plan with a large central room and two banks of side rooms. They're oriented, so the corners are oriented to the cardinal points. They have an altar and an offering table. And then they have this really distinctive niched and buttressed 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 grow 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 in the Ubaid. 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 100 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 the same time period we see the beginnings of social and economic differentiation. It's the beginning of society's 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 Ubaid period, this is excavations by an Iraqi archaeologist named Sabah Abu Jassim at a site called Tell Abadah in central Iraq. And he was able to expose about 80% of a village dating to the Ubaid period. And what I want to point out to you is first that very standard Ubaid style of house, right, that I pointed out, that tripartite house. But look at the size differences. 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 worked stone goods. And here's the neat part. These houses were built and rebuilt over a period of about 150 years. And throughout that time, that largest house in the settlement remained the largest house in the 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 marked social stratification that we see in the first cities of the Uruk period and the early dynastic period. Some of the evidence for these wealth and power differences can be seen in what anthropologists 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 site called Tepe Gowra in 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 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 good, a symbol of power. And this very elaborate modeled necklace around him. So it's a very distinctive southern Mesopotamian style of figurine. They're called Ophidian or reptilian figurines. But this seems to be a person with some kind of a leadership position. And this was found at Eridu, I believe, in southern Mesopotamia in the Ubaid 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 Ubaid culture, which originates in southern Mesopotamia in the orange area on the map, during the later Ubaid period, that Ubaid 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. Ubaid pottery and Ubaid-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 Ubaid horizon that spreads and extends about 2,000 kilometers across the Near East, sharing the same pottery styles and some other aspects of Ubaid culture. So 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 Ubaid starts in the south. Early on in the Ubaid 1 and 2 period, there's the Ubaid culture in southern Mesopotamia and the Halaf culture in northern Mesopotamia. During the later Ubaid, Ubaid 3-4, the Ubaid 3-4 continues in southern Mesopotamia but then spreads into northern Mesopotamia where it replaces the earlier Halaf. So it spreads out and replaces the preceding local cultures. Now, it seems to me that the best way to understand the Ubaid 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 Ubaid are 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 Ubaid settlements and we have large Ubaid towns, without that problem of the massive alluviation from the Tigris and Euphrates River. So that's why we're so interested in this site of Tel Zeydan. 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 Tabqa Dam in north Syria. And flowing north to south is the Balikh River. It originates in the Haran Plain. Haran, of course, is known from the patriarchal narratives from the book of Genesis. It's also, Haran is Karai, the scene of, for those of you who are into gross stuff as I am, the defeat of the Roman general Crassus by the Parthians, where they killed him by pouring molten gold down his throat. That was much later, of course. I'm dealing with a pre-metallurgical period. Anyway, so the Balikh River intersects the Euphrates. And that's important because what it means is Tel Zeydan 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 along the Balikh 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 Balikh River trade route. Now, explorations of the Balikh began in the mid-20s and really accelerated in the 1930s with Max Maliwan, who was the husband of Agatha Christie. And Agatha Christie talks about this beautifully in 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's talking with her husband, and he's saying, oh, you know, I'm thinking of shifting my focus from Tel Brak and Chagar Bazaar to perhaps the Balikh. And then she says, the Balikh, I say innocently, and he goes whacking great tells all along it, which is a bit of an exaggeration, but it's nice. 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 at the confluence of the Balikh 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. Tel Zeydan 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 desert, well, arid steppe, but, you know, it's pretty indistinguishable from desert. Once you get outside of the river valley, it's very, very arid. But in the river valley, there's very fertile agriculture. So what we have then is the modern city of Raqqa, the 3rd and 2nd millennium city of Telbiya, which was known as Tutul in the time of the Mari letters, the early to mid-2nd millennium BC, and then just across the Balikh, the earliest center, regional center at the site is at Tel Zeydan. So it has always been a nodal point, rich for agriculture and very well situated for trade. Now, the site of, so the history of major settlements in this site really goes back to about 5,800 BC with Tel Zeydan. But it continued over the millennia through Telbiya to Tutul in the Seleucid Hellenistic times. This site of Raqqa was called Kalinikos, and later Leontopolis in Byzantine times, and then Raqqa in early Islamic times. The word Raqqa means morass or swamp, and it's actually a very accurate name. The high point of Raqqa occurred in the 8th century and early 9th century when under the Abbasid Caliphate, where first the Caliph al-Mansur built a very large palace complex there. And then the Caliph Harun al-Rashid, whom we know of from, he figures very prominently in the Arabian Nights, the Thousand and One Nights. He actually turned Raqqa into his capital. Al-Mansur had built a very large city right next door to Raqqa, which he called al-Rafiqah, which means the companion. And al-Rafiqah and Raqqa merged into one another and became quite a powerful place. This is a wonderful aerial photograph showing you the U or horseshoe-shaped city of al-Rafiqah 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-Mansur 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 Qasr al-Banat. Raqqa was one of the leading centers of the masterpieces of Islamic art and creativity. In the 8th, 9th, 10th, 12th, and 13th centuries, until its destruction by the Mongols. But most of you will probably have heard of lusterware, 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 Circassians 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 Abbasid Caliphate for a brief shining moment. Just to show you some of the Bedouin people who live in this area, the town, the area has very strong Bedouin characters still, and it's really very manifest in just the strong tradition of hospitality. And our friends from the Raqqa 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 al-Arsuzi Elementary School, which, you know, it was very nice to have the accommodations there until we can, we're hoping to build a dig house, hopefully starting this summer. We were there for about two and a half weeks before I found out that Zeki al-Arsuzi is the founder and theoretician of the Ba'ath Party. So that's why the school is named after him. So Tell Zeydan is five kilometers east of the modern city of Raqqa. And as I mentioned, what are the reasons for digging there? First of all, the most important is there are no later occupations on the site. Tell Zeydan was abandoned in 4000 BC, and we think that people moved across the river to this site to found the site of Tutul, or Talbiya. So what that means is you scrape your foot on the surface of that mound, and you are in 4000 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 Ubaid 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 is a joint expedition, a joint Syrian-American project, that our Syrian co-directors are the directors of the Raqqa Museum. In 2008, we worked with Anas al-Khabur, and in 2009 with Mohammed Sarhan from the Raqqa Museum. Tal Zeydan itself is located just on the east bank of the Balik River, and you can see these very, very rich irrigated river terraces planted in cotton and wheat, I think, by and large. These are two of our excavation areas, and I use this picture just to give you an idea of the scale of the site. Tal Zeydan consists of three mounds, and this is just the southernmost of the three. Here you can see it. We were looking at the southern mound here. We were 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, a south mound, a northwest mound, a 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 Tal Zeydan. So much of 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 archaeologists to work there was because the site is threatened by modern agricultural development. And here's the Balik River, what's left of the Balik River right to the west of the site. And amazingly, you can see the step trench that Abbas Ali Zadeh had done. You can see it from 600 miles in outer space on this spot satellite imagery. So that's quite impressive. We actually have made an impression on the site. All right, at the site, the main 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 Halaf, the Ubaid, what's called the Late Chalcolithic I and the Late Chalcolithic II. 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 Halaf. 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 Ubaid period and those following periods, the Late Chalcolithic I and II. We faced 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 guffas or baskets that we used for clearing soil because the rubber basket would protect them from 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 100 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 in, 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 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 LC2, LC1, Ubeid, and Halak. 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 would be very disturbing if you had Halakh material coming out at the top of the mound, but fortunately we don't. Our best evidence for the sequence of the site comes from the excavation of the step trench. And this is Abbas Ali Zadeh was in charge of these excavations. And that recovered really the reliable stratigraphic sequence of the site. And this is the stratigraphic section from Abbas' excavations. And what we have in the middle are something like 6 meters, over 18 feet of well-stratified Ubeid deposits transitioning down into the Halakh at the bottom. And as you can see, the Halakh 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 Halakh through the LC2 just perfectly clusters in a nice gradual transition from about 5,800 BC down to about 4,000 BC. And at that point, around 4,000 BC, that's when Tel Zeydan was abandoned. So I just want to briefly go through what are some of the finds 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 LC2 phase of 4,200 to about 4,000 BC. And this is contemporaneous with the other Oriental Institute excavations in Syria that Clemens Reichel is conducting at the very important site of Hamukar. So we have a lot of similarities to Hamukar to the east. And then these potsherds here actually relate very closely to the earliest occupation at the site of Hacinebi that I dug just to the north in Turkey. So Tel Zeydan 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's excavations in Operation 6 here at the top of the south mound. And the burials had some very interesting kind of body-piercing evidence. These labrets, or 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 finds that we made, this 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, there's this border with these protrusions on it. I don't know if they're flames or horns. I'm not an art historian. And then a cervid, 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 size, it's 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 the east, at Tepegawra, where, not identical, but very, very similar. And what it suggests is that there was a shared set of symbols, or possibly a shared elite culture of this newly emergent group of wealthy, powerful people in this LC2 society. And I've been asking around, trying to find more parallels, and Holly Pittman at the University of Pennsylvania, Martello Frangipane at the University of Rome, Mitchell Rothman at Widener University, they've pointed out a number of extremely interesting similarities. So that this seal from Arslan Tepe, it's that same kind of gabled, rooftop shape, thin profile, with the drilling through it. That same motif of that border with a cervid in the middle of it. And then, in Aksaray, Ajengbuyuk area in central Anatolia. Again, a very similar seal motif. And, of course, not just the one from Tepegawra that I showed you, but a number of other ones. So this is really neat. Tel Zeydan 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 elites 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, the LC2 period, sees the beginnings of metallurgy. We found a tuyer, 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 5th millennium BC. And it's connected with the emergence of these towns and elites in the Chalcolithic period. Beneath that, we have the LC1, or Late Chalcolithic 1 period. And this is a period we really don't know a lot about. This is sort of intermediate between the Ubaid 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. It's distinguished by this kind of flint-scraped bowl that resembles things that are called Joba bowls in southeast Anatolia. And something like 50% of the pottery that we find are these flint-scraped, beaded-lipped bowls. We also find domestic architecture from that period, complete with these large pithoid buried in the courtyards of houses, with grain scoops found inside them. They buried them up to their the top of their neck, and then covered over the top. So it 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 sealing use of administrative activity. And this is 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 Tepegara, and the musculature on the legs is similar, and the position of the legs and the position of the animal behind the striding figure are all quite similar. We also found large numbers of scrunched up pieces of sealing clay. You can see the finger impressions still on them from where they were scrunched in a person's hand. So there was 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 sealings in the coming seasons. And then, there are these bizarre mullers, which I mentioned were typical of the Ubaid period. What we never expected is that the use of these mullers continued into this LC1 or late-Chalcolithic I period, and we found a number of fragments now, and even one more or less complete example of these mullers. 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 at Tel Zeydan developed very organically out of the earlier Ubaid culture. And very tantalizingly, we found a piece of a niched and buttressed building in this LC1 period. Probably a public building of some sort. It always happens that you find it with just a bit of it sticking out of the bulk, and you know you're going to have to go back and dig underneath it. But this, again, would be a continuity with that Ubaid style of niched and buttressed architecture that they used on public buildings and temples in the Ubaid 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 dating to the Ubaid period. One of the nice things that we've been able to find is the transition between the Ubaid and the LC1 period. That this is something that has not been found in very many places, and it really 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 LC1 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 Ubaid 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 Ubaid and the LC1 by looking at the pottery. And when we track the percentage of the flint-scraped bowls, they drop off and the percentage of painted bowls increase. So, when you're in the Ubaid you have none of the flint-scraped bowls and massive amounts of painted pottery. In the LC1 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 Ubaid developed into this LC1 culture. The Ubaid itself, as I said, we have six meters of in situ, intact Ubaid stratigraphy. And it's characterized by this really wonderfully brown painted pottery. A lot of it is geometric shapes, but there also is a 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. It's 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 a gazelle, perhaps, or an ibex with an eye motif. You can see the eye motifs all over in these pot sherds. But this particular configuration is interesting by having the animal with the eye located between its legs. And Jean Evans from our crew, who's an art historian, pointed out that she found a pot sherd. And just this small pot sherd you can see on the sherd 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, 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 Ubaid 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. It 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 Ubaid houses. A large complex of kilns used for baking, firing pottery. And kiln wasters, over-fired ceramics. So, we know that there was ceramic production taking place at the site in the Ubaid 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. We're sort of contractually obligated to find sling bullets. And we were in one, in Operation Eight, we found more than 1000 of these things in one single deposit. So, it's really quite remarkable. That would kill a lot of gazelles. We also found, and this is something that really excites me about the potential of the site, we finally started finding some of these Ubaid 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 upturned sides in parallel open 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 steatite or chloride or soapstone. Which, the sources of chloride are near Diyarbakir in eastern Turkey. Probably about 200-300 kilometers away. We called that one the back scratcher 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 kilometers away, probably the Lake Van area, and it was worked by someone very skillful. So all of these are starting to show up in our Ubaid deposits and it tells us that yes, this really is a society that has prestige goods and almost certainly has some level of social differentiation. Beneath the Ubaid, our earliest levels we've reached so far date to the Halaf period. And they're characterized by this just absolutely beautiful painted handmade pottery with a very characteristic motif of the Halaf period or what's called bucrania or bull heads. And you can see some schematic bucranium here, another one here, and in that upper picture on the second row, second from the left, more bucrania. Very characteristic of a Halaf. We also have the Venus of Tel Zeydan, this miniature female figurine, and Halaf seals which are very distinctive to this period. These are also made of, this one is made of carved soapstone or chlorite which again would have been a 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 Halaf period. So there's something going on in the Halaf period that the beginnings of something that is really tantalizing to ask just how complex was Halaf 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 at the University of California did an analysis of some of the obsidian samples using 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 Nemrud Dag, which is a volcano on the south shores of Lake Van 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 Tel Zeydan 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 Dag. And then that lake in the upper right hand portion of the slide is Lake Sevan in Armenia. So it's possible that at least some of the obsidian was coming from really even further afield than Lake Van. But what I want to emphasize then is Zeydan 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 archaeobotany of Tel Zeydan and the Zoology. We're recovering evidence for the cultivation of barley. We want to try and understand how their farming system worked 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 seasons, 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 Uruk period, the origins of those societies, their roots in the Ubaid. 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 12.5 hectares, which makes it as big, if not bigger, than that site of Eridu in southern Mesopotamia, which is the type site for the Ubaid. 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. 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. Most of all I want to thank the staff of the Tel Zeydan excavation crew, who are just a remarkable bunch of people and a privilege to work with. Thank you very much.