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Early Agricultural Settlements in the Sinjar Plain, Northern Iraq

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

N. Y. Merpert  and
R. M. Munchaev
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Extract

In the spring of 1969 the Soviet archaeological expedition began extensive studies of early agricultural sites in north-western Iraq. Up to that time the investigation of archaeological cultures representing the early stages of development of food-producing economies in Mesopotamia had been confined to north-eastern Iraq and western Iran, the mountains of Kurdistan and the Zagros with their foothills and valleys. But in north-western Iraq, from Mosul to the Syrian frontier, there are areas whose natural resources offer an equally fruitful prospect for investigation of this process. One such area particularly favourable to agriculture from its earliest stages is the broad and fertile Sinjar plain. Eastward the plain borders on the Mosul region, beyond which lie the Kurdish foothills around Erbil and Kirkuk, and on the north it is bounded by Jebel Sinjar, rising to a height of c. 1250 m. This range reproduces on a small scale the natural conditions of the Zagros, and abounds in caves, but is as yet inadequately investigated. Winter rainfall is relatively high, and a number of small perennial streams flow from the hills into the soft alluvial soils of the plain, which are extremely fertile and favour the construction of simple irrigation systems; in places these now extend up to 15 km. south of the range.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , Autumn 1973 , pp. 93 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1973

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References

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70 Up to now some 30 tholoi, including the large houses and smaller subsidiary rooms, have been found at Yarim Tepe II, more than in all other Halaf sites combined. At Arpachiyah there were 10, at Tepe Gawra 1, at Nuzi 2, at Çayönü in south-east Turkey 9 (Braidwood, R. J.et al., Science 164, no. 3885 (1969), 1275–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

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