Hassuna

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Holocene epoch This box: view • talk • edit
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Holocene
Preboreal (10.3 ka – 9 ka), Boreal (9 ka – 7.5 ka), Atlantic (7.5 ka – 5 ka), Subboreal (5 ka – 2.5 ka) Subatlantic (2.5 ka – present)

Coordinates: 36°10′00″N 43°06′00″E / 36.166667°N 43.100000°E / 36.166667; 43.100000

Hassuna or Tell Hassuna is an ancient Mesopotamian site situated in Iraq, south of Mosul.

Excavations were initiated at Hassuna in the 1930s by British archaeologist Seton Lloyd who worked closely with the Oriental Institute in Chicago. ^[1]

By around 6000 BC people had moved into the foothills (piedmont) of northernmost Mesopotamia where there was enough rainfall to allow for "dry" agriculture in some places. These were the first farmers in northernmost Mesopotamia (the region known as Assyria). They made Hassuna style pottery^[2] (cream slip with reddish paint in linear designs). Hassuna people lived in small villages or hamlets ranging from 2 to 8 acres (32,000 m²). Even the largest Hassuna sites were smaller than PPNA Jericho had been 1000 years before and much smaller than Çatal Hüyük, which was still occupied in Anatolia. Probably few if any Hassuna villages exceeded 500 people.

At Tell Hassuna, adobe dwellings built around open central courts with fine painted pottery replace earlier levels with crude pottery. Hand axes, sickles, grinding stones, bins, baking ovens and numerous bones of domesticated animals reflect settled agricultural life. Female figurines have been related to worship and jar burials within which food was placed related to belief in afterlife. The relationship of Hassuna pottery to that of Jericho suggests that village culture was becoming widespread.

[edit] References

1. ^ Matthews, 2003. The Archaeology of Mesopotamia: Theories and Approaches. Routledge. London.
2. ^ Hassuna style pottery

[edit] See also

• Cities of the ancient Near East