Tell (archaeology)
Beersheva, Israel
In
Arabic: تَلّ, tall, "mound" or "small hill")[1] is an artificial topographical feature, a mound[a] consisting of the accumulated and stratified debris of a succession of consecutive settlements at the same site, the refuse of generations of people who built and inhabited them and natural sediment.[2][3][4][b]
Tells are most commonly associated with the
Hellenistic period with its own, different settlement-building patterns.[citation needed] Many tells across the Near East continue to be occupied and used today.[13]
Etymology
The word tell is first attested in English in an 1840 report in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society.[14] It is derived from the Arabic تَلّ (tall) meaning "mound" or "hillock".[1] Variant spellings include tall, tel, til and tal.[15]
The Arabic word has many
Ugaritic tl[16] and Hebrew tel (תל).[17] The Akkadian form is similar to Sumerian DUL, which can also refer to a pile of any material, such as grain, but it is not known whether the similarity reflects a borrowing from that language or if the Sumerian term itself was a loanword from an earlier Semitic substrate language.[18] If Akkadian tīlu is related to another word in that language, til'u, meaning "woman's breast", there exists a similar term in the South Semitic classical Ethiopian language of Geʽez, namely təla, "breast".[16] Hebrew tel first appears in the biblical book of Deuteronomy 13:16 (ca 500–700 BCE),[19] describing a heap or small mound and appearing in the books of Joshua, and Jeremiah with the same meaning.[citation needed
]
There are lexically unrelated equivalents for this geophysical concept of a town-mound in other
khirbet, also spelled khirbat (خربة), meaning "ruin", also occurs in the names of many archaeological tells, such as Khirbet et-Tell (roughly meaning "heap of ruins").[23]
Formation
A tell can only be formed if natural and man-produced material accumulates faster than it is removed by
human-caused truncation,[4] which explains the limited geographical area they occur in.[original research?
]
Tells are formed from a variety of remains, including organic and cultural refuse, collapsed mudbricks and other building materials, water-laid sediments, residues of biogenic and geochemical processes and aeolian sediment.[24] A classic tell looks like a low, truncated cone with sloping sides[25] and a flat, mesa-like top.[26] They can be more than 43 m (141 ft) high.[21]
Occurrence
Southwest Asia
It is thought that the earliest examples of tells are to be found in the Jordan Valley, such as at the 10-meter-high mound, dating back to the proto-Neolithic period, at Jericho in the West Bank.[2] Upwards of 5,000 tells have been detected in the area of ancient Israel and Jordan.[27] Of these Paul Lapp calculated in the 1960s that 98% had yet to be touched by archaeologists.[27]
In Syria tells are abundant in the Upper Mesopotamia region, scattered along the Euphrates, including Tell al-'Abr, Tell Bazi, Tell Kabir, Tell Mresh, Tell Saghir and Tell Banat.[28] The last is thought to be the site of the oldest war memorial (known as the White Monument), dating from the 3rd millennium BCE.[29]
Europe
Tells can be found in Europe in countries such as Spain, Hungary, Romania,[6] Bulgaria,[30] North Macedonia and Greece.[6]
Northeastern Bulgaria has a rich archaeological heritage of eneolithic (4900–3800 BCE[31]) tells from the 5th millennium BCE.[30]
In Neolithic Greece there is a contrast between the northern
communal society, whereas Halstead emphasized the idea that they arose as individual household structures.[33] Thessalian tells often reflect small hamlets with a small population of around 40–80.[34]
The Toumbas of Macedonia and the Magoulas of Thessaly are the local names for tell sites in these regions of Greece.
See also
References
Notes
- ^ "Artificial mounds are a characteristic feature of permanent and semipermanent settlement locations in past cultural landscapes, particularly on sedimentary plains, but also in arid and semiarid regions." (Orengo et al. 2020, p. 18240)
- ^ "It is a paradox that a tell cannot by definition begin life as a tell – its earliest incarnation is as a flat site, like other flat sites in its vicinity. Such places did not take on the visual characteristics of tells for some generations but remained in statu nascendi. There is a critical time between the first reoccupation of a placed and the physical manifestation of a mound-a period of generations, if not centuries… The physical transformation of a tell-to-be into a tell depends upon two long-term physical concentrations – of people and house daub.. The nucleation of people in households living close to one another is the first prerequisite of tell-becoming." (Chapman 2000, p. 207)
Citations
- ^ a b Kirkpatrick 1983, p. 1330.
- ^ a b c Shaw 2002, p. 566.
- ^ Negev & Gibson 2001, p. 497.
- ^ a b Matthews 2014.
- ^ Bailey&al 1998, pp. 373–396.
- ^ a b c Blanco-González & Kienlin 2020, see map.
- ^ MacDonald 1997, pp. 40–42.
- ^ Davidson&al 2010, pp. 1564–1571.
- ^ Kotsakis 1999, p. 66.
- ^ Wilkinson 2003, pp. 100–127.
- ^ Blanco-González & Kienlin 2020.
- ^ Chapman 2020.
- ^ ASOR 2019.
- ^ OED - tell.
- ^ a b Hirst 2019.
- ^ a b Leslau 1958, p. 55.
- ^ Biblehub: tel.
- ^ Suriano 2012, pp. 214, notes 17–19.
- ^ Bos 2013.
- ^ Shaw 2002, p. 567.
- ^ a b Matthews 2020, p. 7260.
- ^ Warfield 1885, p. 274.
- ^ Wagemakers 2014, p. 40.
- ^ Wilkinson 2003, p. 108.
- ^ Albright 1949, p. 16.
- ^ Suriano 2012, p. 213.
- ^ a b Lapp 1975, p. 1.
- ^ Porter 2018, pp. 195–224.
- ^ Porter et al. 2021, pp. 900–918.
- ^ a b Bailey&al 1998, p. 378.
- ^ Bailey&al 1998, p. 375).
- ^ Bintliff 2012, p. 53.
- ^ Bintliff 2012, pp. 53–54.
- ^ Bintliff 2012, p. 55.
Works cited
- Albright, William Foxwell (1949). The Archaeology of Palestine. Penguin Books. pp. 7–22.
- Bailey, Douglass; Tringham, Ruth; Bass, Jason; Stevanović, Mirjana; Hamilton, Mike; Neumann, Heike; Angelova, Ilke; Raduncheva, Ana (Winter 1998). "Expanding the Dimensions of Early Agricultural Tells: The Podgoritsa Archaeological Project, Bulgaria". Journal of Field Archaeology. 25 (4): 373–396. JSTOR 530635.
- Bintliff, John (2012). The Complete Archaeology of Greece: From Hunter-Gatherers to the 20th Century A.D. ISBN 978-1-118-25520-9.
- Blanco-González, Antonio; Kienlin, Tobias L. (2020). "Introduction: Learning from Prehistoric Tells". In Blanco-González, Antonio; Kienlin, Tobias L. (eds.). Current Approaches to Tells in the Prehistoric Old World: A cross-cultural comparison from Early Neolithic to the Iron Age. ISBN 978-1-78925-487-7.
- Bos, James M. (2013). Reconsidering the Date and Provenance of the Book of Hosea. Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-0-567-06889-7.
- Chapman, John (2000). Fragmentation in Archaeology: People, Places, and Broken Objects in the Prehistory of South-eastern Europe. ISBN 978-0-415-15803-9.
- Chapman, John (2020). "Then, Now, to Come – A Commentary". In Blanco-González, Antonio; Kienlin, Tobias L. (eds.). Current Approaches to Tells in the Prehistoric Old World: A cross-cultural comparison from Early Neolithic to the Iron Age. ISBN 978-1-78925-487-7.
- Davidson, Donald A.; Wilson, Clare A.; Lemos, Irene S.; Theocharopoulos, S. P. (1 July 2010). "Tell formation processes as indicated from geoarchaeological and geochemical investigations at Xeropolis, Euboea, Greece". hdl:1893/16434.
- Hirst, K. Kris (22 March 2019). "What Is a Tell? The Remnants of Ancient Mesopotamian Cities". ThoughtCo.
- Kirkpatrick, E. M., ed. (1983). ISBN 0-550-10234-5.
- Kotsakis, Kostas (1999). "What Tells can Tell: Social Space and Settlement in the Greek Neolithic". In Halstead, Paul (ed.). Neolithic Society in Greece. ISBN 978-1-850-75824-2.
- Lapp, Paul W. (1975). ISBN 978-1-725-24234-0.
- Leslau, Wolf (1958). Ethiopic and South Arabic Contributions to the Hebrew Lexicon. Vol. XX. University of California Publicans in Semitic Philology.
- MacDonald, Kevin C. (23 November 1997). "More forgotten tells of Mali: an archaeologist's journey from here to Timbuktu" (PDF). Archaeology International. 1 (1): 40–42. .
- Matthews, Wendy (2014). "Introduction and Definition". In Smith, C. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. New York: Springer. ISBN 978-1-4419-0426-3.
- S2CID 241215415.
- ISBN 978-0-8264-1316-1. Retrieved 9 October 2021.
- Orengo, Hector A.; Conesa, Francesc C.; Garcia-Molsosa, Arnau; Lobo, Agustín; Green, Adam S.; Madella, Marco; Petrie, Cameron A. (4 August 2020). "Automated detection of archaeological mounds using machine-learning classification of multisensor and multitemporal satellite data" (PDF). PMID 32690717.
- Porter, Anne (2018). Otto, A. (ed.). "From Pottery to Chronology: The Middle Euphrates Region in Late Bronze Age Syria. Proceedings of a Workshop in Mainz (Germany)" (PDF). The Tell Banat Settlement Complex during the Third and Second Millennia BCE. Vorderasiatische Archäologie: 195–224.
- Porter, Anne; McClellan, Thomas; Wilhelm, Susanne; Weber, Jill; et al. (August 2021). ""Their corpses will reach the base of heaven": a third-millennium BCE war memorial in northern Mesopotamia?". Antiquity. 95 (382). Cambridge University Press: 900–918. .
- Shaw, Ian (2002). "Tell". In Shaw, Ian; Jameson, Robert (eds.). A Dictionary of Archaeology. ISBN 978-0-631-23583-5.
- Suriano, Matthew J. (2012). "Ruin Hills at the Threshold of the Netherworld: The Tell in the Conceptual Landscape of the Ba'al Cycle and Ancient Near Eastern Mythology". Die Welt des Orients. 42 (2): 210–230. JSTOR 23342127.
- "tel". biblehub.
- "tell". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
- "TerraWatchers, UCSD, and ASOR CHI Partner to Monitor Archaeological Sites". ASOR. 17 January 2019. Retrieved 13 October 2021.[dead link]
- Wagemakers, Bart (2014). "Khirbet Et-Tell (Ai?)". Archaeology in the 'Land of Tells and Ruins': A History of Excavations in the Holy Land Inspired by the Photographs and Accounts of Leo Boer. ISBN 978-1-782-97245-7.
- Warfield, Benjamin (1885). "The Scenes of the Baptist's Work". In Hodder and Stoughton. pp. 267–282.
- Wilkinson, Toby J. (2003). Archaeological Landscapes of the Near East. ISBN 978-0-816-52173-9.
Further reading
- Lloyd, Seton (1963). Mounds of the Near East. Edinburgh University Press – via Internet Archive.
- Small, David B. (2019). The Ancient Greeks: Social Structure and Evolution. ISBN 978-0-521-89505-7.
External links
Media related to Tell (archaeology) at Wikimedia Commons
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