The Neolithic Cemetery at Tell el-Kerkh is the second volume of the final reports on the excavations at Tell el-Kerkh, northwest Syria, focusing on the discovery of a Pottery Neolithic cemetery dating between c. 6400 and 6100 BC, one of the oldest outdoor communal cemeteries in West Asia.
Syria has been a major crossroads of civilizations in the ancient Near East since the dawn of human kind. This volume brings together scholars involved in archaeological activities in Syria and focusses on the scientific aspects of each explored site, allowing researchers to examine in detail each heritage site, its characteristics and identity.
This volume presents the long history of Syria through a jouney of the most important and recently-excavated archaeological sites. The sites cover over 1.8 million years and all regions in Syria; 110 academics have contributed information on 103 excavations for this volume
Croucher explores what mortuary practices can reveal about the living populations in the Neolithic Near East. Incorporating evidence from excavations, she provides an overview of the period and offers a unique insight into changing attitudes towards the human body, identity, and the experiences of the lived populations of the Neolithic Near East.
Remembering the Dead in the Ancient Near East is among the first comprehensive treatments to present the diverse ways in which ancient Near Eastern civilizations memorialized and honored their dead, using mortuary rituals, human skeletal remains, and embodied identities as a window into the memory work of past societies. In six case studies teams of researchers with different skillsets—osteological analysis, faunal analysis, culture history and the analysis of written texts, and artifact analysis—integrate mortuary analysis with bioarchaeological techniques. Drawing upon different kinds of data, including human remains, ceramics, jewelry, spatial analysis, and faunal remains found in burial sites from across the region’s societies, the authors paint a robust and complex picture of death in the ancient Near East. Demonstrating the still underexplored potential of bioarchaeological analysis in ancient societies, Remembering the Dead in the Ancient Near East serves as a model for using multiple lines of evidence to reconstruct commemoration practices. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian societies, the archaeology of death and burial, bioarchaeology, and human skeletal biology.
The Tell el-Hesi site comprises a 25-acre walled city from the Early Bronze III period. It is located on the southeastern edge of the Mediterranean coastal plain, 26 km northeast of Gaza in Israel. Tell el-Hesi was the first Palestinian site at which the principles of ceramic chronology and of stratigraphic excavation were applied and at which the relationship between pottery and stratigraphy was shown to be significant. In 1890 W.M. Flinders Petrie excavated at Hesi and produced a general picture of its occupational history. In 1891-92, F.J. Bliss excavated stratigraphically through each successive level of the mound and identified eleven occupational levels which he grouped into eight strata or "cities". In 1970, The Joint Archaeological Expedition to Tell el-Hesi, sponsored by the American Schools of Oriental Research and a consortium of educational institutions, entered the site with the objectives of investigating in greater detail and with more refined methods the stratigraphic divisions identified by Petrie and Bliss. This book appears as the fifth volume in the Joint Expedition's series of final publications regarding their field experience and findings. The Joint Expedition had its first field season in June 1970 and returned to the site for further excavation in the summers of odd-numbered years. The first four seasons (1970-75) have been designated Phase One, and were largely limited to the later occupation levels on the summit and southern slope of the site's northeast hill or acropolis, although there were also probes and limited exploration of the larger Early Bronze (EB) city. The next four seasons (1977-93) were designated Phase Two, with work continuing in the Iron Age levels of the acropolis and also extending to the southern EB city wall and associated domestic structures. This volume is primarily devoted to Phase Two of the expedition and details the burials unearthed during this excavation period when a large number of graves overlying Early Bronze Age strata were found in Fields V and VI
This volume explores the cultural meaning of ochre among the societies of the Late Epipalaeolithic/Mesolithic and the Early Neolithic from the Levant to the Carpathian Basin.
Shanidar Cave in the Zagros Mountains, with its 26 burials containing 35 bodies, is the oldest prehistoric site with the longest history of occupation in Iraq'. This volume provides an archaeological overview of the site, which dates to the 11th millennium BC, excavated throughly by Ralph Solecki throughout the 1950s.