Current project:

"Vegetation history and archaeobotany of the Syrian Jazira with specific focus on the 3rd millennium BC"

From an archaeological viewpoint the Syrian Jazira is one of the most important areas in the Near East.
It is located south of the Taurus Mountains between the two major rivers Euphrates and Tigris and forms the central part of the so called 'fertile crescent' (fig.1). It could be this landscape, in which about 10.000 years ago the earliest Neolithic developed. But not only is this region widely known for the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic, later settlement periods add to its importance too. Above all, the Early Bronze Age should be mentioned here, where, at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC and following developments in Mesopotamia, also in Syria an early phase of urbanisation started.
A specific group of urban centres, the so called 'Kranzhügel' or 'cup and saucers' (fig.2) play a very important role in this context. Their distribution is limited to a comparably small area north of the Euphrates, in the steppe between the rivers Khabur and Balikh and the area around Djeble Abd al-Aziz. One of the 'Kranzhügel', Tell Chuera (fig.2), is the largest of these constructions and intense fieldwork has been carried out in its surrounding.

Today the traveller perceives the Jazira as a dry, treeless and sparsely inhabited steppe. Looking at this modern landscape the question arises how it was possible, that the same land was densely populated in the 3rd millennium BC. Where did the food for a large urban population come from and why did this people leave? Almost one century of intensive archaeological research has been carried out to investigate the Syrian settlement history. In contrast, hardly anything is known about the vegetation history of this landscape and therefore, the afore mentioned questions could not have been answered yet.

For a long time it seemed impossible to conduct palynological research in the semiarid Syrian steppe. Nevertheless, the work of Seitze Bottema, Willem van Zeist and Arlette Leroi-Gourhan has shown that the area does hold some pollen bearing sediments. During the course of the current research project, pollen records from different sites have been uncovered. These are currently being analysed at the J.-W. Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main.

 

 

 

Fig.1: The name Jazira (engl. island) refers to the area, that is located south of the Taurus, between Euphrates and Tigris. It forms the central part of the so called 'fertile crescent'.

Fig.2: The ‚Kranzhügel'-complex Tell Chuera distinctly arises from the plane steppe floor. The distribution of the 'Kranzhügel' is limited to a rather small area between the rivers Khabur and Balikh and the area north of Djeble Abd al-Aziz.