Hassuna (6000 BC - 5250 BC)
- by around 6000 BC, farming 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 (Assyria)
- They made Hassuna style pottery
- cream slip, reddish paint in linear designs, also applied decoration, eyes and ears, animal heads, etc.
- Hassuna people lived in small villages or hamlets
- ranging from under 1 ha to around 3 ha (hectares)
- or about 2 to 8 acres
- or ranging from a bit more than one football field with endzones to about four football fields with endzones
- Just for reference, here are some comparisons to help you visualize site areas
- 1 ha = 100 X 100 m (10,000 m2), or about 2.5 acres
- a football field with endzones = about 0.75 ha
- even the largest Hassuna sites, at around 3 ha, were smaller than PPNA Jericho had been 1000 years before (4 ha)
- and much smaller than Çatal Hüyük (13 ha), which was still occupied in Anatolia
- probably few, if any, Hassuna villages exceeded 500 people
- so in terms of settlement size, we are looking at some fairly ordinary early farmers here
- subsistence:
- earliest occupations may have been intensive foragers
- may have only been semi-permanent, leaving in bad years
- cultivated wheat (emmer and einkorn) and barley, but no evidence of irrigation
- remember, "dry" rainfed agriculture is feasible in the northern part of Mesopotamia
- kept sheep, goats, pigs
- but hunting was still very important, especially onager (wild ass), some gazelle
- rectangular multi-roomed free-standing houses of packed mud ("tauf")
- walled yards with outdoor ovens
- small rooms with plastered floors and wall niches for storage
- wall paintings
- indoor ovens with chimneys
- at the site of Tell Hassuna: in addition to houses, also larger central buildings (~5500 BC)
- with rows of small, square rooms
- unplastered walls
- plain dirt floors
- no hearths or food garbage
- obviously for some special purpose
- probably storage
- presumably used by the community as a group (certainly not by just any one family)
- one room had 2,400 baked clay sling missiles and 100 large baked clay balls: a hunting arsenal?
- maybe the site was a specialized hunting center, exchanging animal products for cultivated foods??
- Point: a group effort to build, presumably stocked or used by the group
- purpose looks economic, probably storage of food for consumption or exchange
- implies some kind of group coordination, organization, leadership
- since the building seems to be a centralized, community storage place, it suggests that some of the economy may have been redistributive
- and therefore there was some kind of community institution for collecting, storing and redistributing goods
- a chief?
- a governing body?
- a temple or priest?
- they also started to make stamp seals for use on clay
- seals are used to press an image on clay, like you do with sealing wax
- the resulting impression is called a "sealing"
- a glob of clay pressed over a knot or the edge of a lid and then marked with a seal can be used to close tied-up bundles, covers on jars, or even doorways, so that they can't be tampered with
- which, in turn, is useful if you are storing valuable goods that someone or some institution owns or controls access to
- so these stamps may suggest private property, exchange, or communal storage
- that is, an increasingly complex economy
- you might just note how different this communal construction and use of seals for storage is from either PPNA Jericho or Çatal Hüyük
- Hassuna society and its contemporaries in Mesopotamia were developing different features that ultimately would lead to different outcomes
The History of the Ancient Near East Electronic Compendium
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