Ancient settlement mound From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In archaeology, a tell (from 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][c]
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 cognates in other Semitic languages, such as Akkadiantīlu(m), Ugaritictl[16] and Hebrewtel (תל).[17] The Akkadian form is similar to SumerianDUL, 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 Deuteronomy13:16 (c. 700–500 BCE),[19] describing a heap or small mound and appearing in the books of Joshua and Jeremiah with the same meaning.[citation needed]
Equivalents
There are lexically unrelated equivalents for this geophysical concept of a town-mound in other Southwest Asian languages, including kom in Egyptian Arabic,[20]tepe or tappeh (Turkish/Persian: تپه), hüyük or höyük (Turkish) and chogha (Persian: چغا, from Turkish çokmak and derivatives çoka etc.).[21]
In toponyms
Equivalent words for town-mound often appear in place names,[15] and the word "tell" itself is one of the most common prefixes for Palestinian toponyms.[22] The Arabic word 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]
A tell can form only if natural and man-made material accumulates faster than it is removed by erosion and 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 43m (141ft) high.[21]
It is thought that the earliest examples of tells are 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] More than 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]
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 Thessalian plain, where rainfall was sufficient to permit densely populated settlements based on dry-farming, and the more dispersed sites in southern Greece, such as the Peloponesus, where early villages sprang up around the smaller arable tracts close to springs, lakes, and marshes.[32] Two models account for the tell structures of this part of southern Europe, one developed by Paul Halstead and the other by John Chapman. Chapman envisaged the tell as witness to a nucleated communal society, whereas Halstead emphasized the idea that they arose as individual household structures.[33] Thessalian tells often reflect small hamlets with a 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.
"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)
Oded Borowski notes that, when transliterating a Hebrew toponym, the English spelling is tel, as opposed to conversion from Arabic, when the word is written "tell". (Borowski 2021)
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. Oxbow Books. ISBN978-1-78925-487-7.
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. Oxbow Books. ISBN978-1-78925-487-7.
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. doi:10.13109/wdor.2012.42.2.210. JSTOR23342127.
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. Oxbow Books. ISBN978-1-782-97245-7.
