Chapter 6: Neolithic 4 DBAYE (Pages 423-424)

Excerpts and Definitions and Addendums:

The site was discovered long ago by Zumoffen and others have picked up material there since. Much of this has been deposited in the Universite Saint-Joseph and at the Museum of the American University in Beirut where I have examined it. The finds from the site consisted entirely of flint artifacts and of these the heavy tools, axes, chisels and picks were the most prominent. The axes were of a variety of shapes and some were unusually large. Those with rounded cutting edges were either oval or almond-shaped while the straight-edged axes were triangular or trapezoidal. The chisels were usually quite small and narrow with rounded or straight cuttin edges. Most of the picks were small with rounded butts; these tools were probably for woodworking like the axes and chisels. In addition there were a number of heavy spherical flint hammers which may have been used to make the other large tools.

The assemblages from Dbaye I included a number of tanged arrowheads and a variety of segmented sickle blades, mostly with fine edge retouch but a few with coarse denticulation. There were also a range of borers, some knives, burins and end and side-scrapers.

Cauvin has published mich of the available material ans has concluded that the site was inhabited at the same time as the Neolithique Moyen settlement at Byblos principally because the typology of the axes, chisels, sickle blades and arrowheads was the same at both sites. The site was visited in other periods however on the evidence of a few other finds.

There is another site in the vicinity of Dbaye which has yielded a little more material of the same kind which Copeland and Wescombe called Dbaye III and Cauvin, apparently in error, Dbaye II. Here again there were a number of axes and other heavy tools but relatively few sickle blades, arrowheads and scrapers.

The assemblages from these two sites may resemble that from Byblos typologically but it is clear that the way of life of the inhabitants of Dbaye I and Dbaye III were different. The presence of a number of arrowheads suggests that hunting contributed significantly to the diet, supplementing the fruits of agriculture presumably, but the heavy tools indicate that the inhabitants spent much time in clearing the surrounding woodland and shaping timber ...

The History of the Ancient Near East Electronic Compendium