The Halaf Period in Northern Mesopotamia.

• Author: GUT, RENATE V.
• Position: Review

The Halaf Period in Northern Mesopotamia. By ISMAIL HIJARA. EDUBBA, vol. 6. London: NABU PUBLICATIONS, 1997. Pp. 159, maps, 101 figures, 94 plates.

Tell es-Sawwan: The Architecture of the Sixth Millennium B. C. By DONNY GEORGE YOUKANA. EDUBBA, vol. 5. London: NABU PUBLICATIONS, 1997. Pp. 72, maps, 22 illustrations, 42 plates.

Two new volumes of the EDUBBA series, created to make the archaeological material from Iraqi excavations and museum collections accessible to a wider public, deal with the Late Neolithic cultures of the sixth and fifth millennia B.C. Both are concerned with key sites of the periods in question, Arpachiyah and Tell es-Sawwan, respectively, and both present the results of reinvestigations at those sites.

EDUBBA 6, by Ismail Hijara, The Halaf Period in Northern Mesopotamia, is a revised version of his Ph.D. thesis, submitted in 1980 at the University of Oxford. Eighteen years later, Halaf studies have considerably progressed, and although Hijara did his best to include recent research, such as the results of the excavations at Sabi Abyad in northern Syria or the archaeological survey around Tell al-Hawa, his introduction (pp. 1-4), his chapter five (pp. 97-106, dealing with the origins, social and political organization, and chronology of the Halaf culture), and his conclusions (pp. 109-11) are sometimes outdated. Nonetheless, this publication is highly welcome, for two reasons. First of all, it contains essential information on the author's reinvestigation of Arpachiyah, a small Halafian village 6 km east of Nineveh, first excavated by Max Mallowan in 1933. To this day, Arpachiyah remains fundamental for our understanding of the Halaf period. It provides us with a long sequence from Early to Late Halaf times , and has produced the earliest stratified Halaf pottery yet known from Iraq (but see now S. Campbell, Subartu 4.1 [1998]: 51, fig. 6, for unstratified Halaf sherds from NJP 72, a small site near Tell al-Hawa, which could be earlier). Mallowan's excavations are not without problems. As Hijara rightly points out, they were conducted "in an eight-week season by a supervisory staff of two with one hundred and eighty workers" (p. 4). More important, Mallowan's sequence was pieced together from disconnected soundings on the main tell and in the surrounding plain, since he had no time to continue his sounding on the tell, which was conducted later, down to virgin soil (pp. 4-5). Mallowan's criteria for connecting the levels of different excavation units were typological aspects of the pottery and architecture (tholoi with or without antechamber, with or without stone foundations, and so on).

To overcome these stratigraphic uncertainties, Hijara reexcavated at Arpachiyah for eight weeks in 1976 (chapter two, figs. 1-6). Through a 57.5 m long and 2-3 m wide, double-L-shaped trench he...