I just found a better article and added a useful link to university of chicago's teams website
Earliest evidence for large scale organized warfare in the Mesopotamian world
University of Chicago-Syrian team report on work near the Iraqi border
LINK
A huge battle destroyed one of the world's earliest cities at around
3500 B.C. and left behind, preserved in their places, artifacts from
daily life in an urban settlement in upper Mesopotamia, according to a
joint announcement from the University of Chicago and the Department of
Antiquities in Syria.
"The whole area of our most recent excavation was a war zone," said
Clemens Reichel, Research Associate at the Oriental Institute of the
University of Chicago. Reichel, the American co-director of the
Syrian-American Archaeological Expedition to Hamoukar, lead a team that
spent October and November at the site. Salam al-Quntar of the Syrian
Department of Antiquities and Cambridge University was Syrian
co-director. Hamoukar is an ancient site in extreme northeastern Syria
near the Iraqi border.
The discovery provides the earliest evidence for large scale organized warfare in the Mesopotamian world, the team said.
The team found extensive destruction with collapsed walls, which had
undergone heavy bombardment by sling bullets and eventually collapsed
in an ensuing fire. Work during an earlier season showed the settlement
was protected by a 10-foot high mud-brick wall.
The excavators retrieved more than 1,200 smaller, oval-shaped
bullets (about an inch long and an inch and a half in diameter) and
some 120 larger round clay balls (two and half to four inches in
diameter). "This clearly was no minor skirmish. This was 'Shock and
Awe' in the Fourth Millennium B.C.," Reichel said.
Excavations at Hamoukar have played an important role in
redefining scholar's understanding of the development of civilization.
Earlier work had contended that cities first developed in the lower
reaches of the Euphrates valley, the area often referred to as Southern
Mesopotamia. Those early urban centers, part of the Uruk culture,
established colonies that led to the civilization of the north, as the
people sought raw materials such as wood, stone, and metals which are
absent in southern Mesopotamia.
Work at Hamoukar, first undertaken by McGuire Gibson, Professor
at the Oriental Institute, between 1999 and 2001 showed that some of
the elements associated with civilization developed there independently
of influences in the south. The latest work suggests that the two
forces may have had a violent confrontation at Hamoukar.
"It is likely that the southerners played a role in the
destruction of this city," Reichel said. "Dug into the destruction
debris that covered the buildings excavated this season were numerous
large pits that contained vast amount of southern Uruk pottery from the
south. The picture is compelling. If the Uruk people weren't the ones
firing the sling bullets they certainly benefited from it. They took
over this place right after its destruction."
Ironically, for archaeological work, ancient warfare has its
advantages, especially when the besieged people may have been
surprised. "Whatever was in these buildings was buried in them,
literally waiting to be retrieved by us." In addition to many objects
of value that are left behind, buried under massive amounts of debris,
such "frozen contexts" are vital for functional analyses, helping to
identify architectural units as domestic units, cooking facilities,
production sites or buildings of administrative or religious use.
The mid-fourth millennium B.C. settlement at Hamoukar has many
distinctively urban features. The area excavated so far contains two
large building complexes built around square courtyards. Though both
buildings follow closely a house plan known from other sites in Syria
and Iraq, their function seems to have been non-domestic.
One of the structures contained a large kitchen with a series
of large grinding stones embedded in clay benches and a baking oven
large enough to fill a whole room, suggesting that food production
occurred here beyond the needs of a single household. Each complex also
contained a tripartite building (a unit consisting of a long central
room surrounded by smaller rooms).
Objects retrieved from one of them, excavated in 2001, included stamp
seals and clay sealings (lumps of clay used to close containers,
usually impressed with a seal), suggesting that it was used as a
storage and redistribution center for commodities. More stamp seals and
over 100 clay sealings were found in 2005, including some sealings with
incised drawings instead of seal impressions indicating that similar
activities occurred in the second complex. The new data lends further
proof to the theory, suggested first after the 1999-2001 excavations,
that a city existed at Hamoukar during mid-fourth millennium B.C.
Work this season reinforced that certain elements of technological
specialization were already present at Hamoukar several hundred years
earlier than the time of the settlement's destruction.
This season three trenches were excavated in the southern area
of the site where previous survey work had shown the presence of
countless pieces of obsidian, both blades and production debris dating
to the mid-to-late fifth millennium B.C., spread over an area of 700
800 acres.
"Finding production debris is actually as important, if not
more important, than finding actual stone tools," explained Salam
al-Quntar, pointing out a well-preserved obsidian core from which long,
narrow blades had been flaked off in a radial pattern. "A settlement of
700 or more acres cannot have existed in the fifth millennium B.C.,"
al-Quntar says, "so we are assuming that this is a smaller 'shifting'
settlement, which over centuries 'moved' across the area of the site.
Little architecture has been found so far, but the remains of a storage
room, which contained numerous large storage vessels, were identified,
and numerous clay 'eye idols' assumed to be connected with cultic
activities."
The nature of the contact that Hamoukar entertained with the
south at that time remains to be investigated more fully. Reichel
points out certain similarities that the architecture of Hamoukar shows
with buildings in southern Mesopotamia, notably in the layout of the
tripartite buildings. Some seal designs also show scenes resembling
motives found in southern Mesopotamia and southwestern Iran. The
pottery and almost all the other artifacts from the excavated area,
however, were entirely of local character, betraying no southern
influence. "We assume that some trade relations existed with the Uruk
culture, but there is no evidence of Uruk control or domination over
Hamoukar before the destruction," he said. But the southern Uruk
clearly dominates the layers just above the destruction.
The 2005 season was the fourth season of archaeological work at
Hamoukar. Between 1999 and 2001 three seasons were conducted under the
co-directorship of McGuire Gibson. Following a four year hiatus and the
2003 Iraq War, in a political climate now overshadowed by misgivings
between the U.S. and Syria, the resumption of a joint Syrian-American
archaeological venture at this time on a site located so close to the
border with Iraq may seem surprising.
Little if any problems could be reported, however, said
Reichel, who praised the cooperation of Syrian government officials who
issued excavation permit swiftly and offered logistical support. "They
welcomed us like old friends."
Abdal-Razzaq Moaz, Deputy Minister of Cuture, in charge of
Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, Syria, said, "Excavations at
Hamoukar have played an important role in redefining scholar's
understanding of the rise and development of civilization in the world.
The resumption of a joint Syrian-American archaeological venture at
this time shows the Syrians are interested to have such collaboration
in the field of archaeology which allowed to have cultural exchange and
mutual understanding between the two people, and to share a world
heritage which belong to all the humanity." Besides the University of
Chicago, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania and other
universities have teams doing archaeological work in Syria, he said.
THE HAMOUKAR EXPEDITION
A step trench looking south
Edited by Leonidas