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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 May 2014
In 1937, in a series in honour of Sir John Myres, Professor Childe wrote an essay entitled ‘Neolithic Black Ware in Greece and on the Danube’. Childe made two major points. He clarified his position that the major direction of diffusion in the spread of the village-farming community was from south-western Asia towards Europe. Secondly, he considered the then available south-west Asiatic evidence—mainly ceramic—which seemed antecedent to similar elements in Greece and subsequently on the Danube.
In this essay in Professor Childe's honour, I propose to bring his second consideration up to date, informally, and with main emphasis on the south-west Asiatic end. Weinberg has recently covered the ground from the Greek point of view with much greater perception than I could do.
It is a bit unfortunate, in relation to Childe's first point, that this essay cannot be postponed for a year or two. During the 1954–5 field season of the Iraq-Jarmo project, we secured a series of fifty-two radioactive carbon samples. Included are specimens from the Halaf levels of Arpachiyah and Tell Halaf itself and from the basal levels of Hassuna, Mersin, and Byblos, as well as further samples from Jarmo and from several of our test excavations. Professor Zeuner has samples in hand from early Jericho, Dr Milojčić has some from Otzaki-Magula, and there may well be other pertinent samples of which I am unaware. It does seem that presently, within the range of reliability of the radioactive carbon dating process, we shall know where we stand chronologically in somewhat more precise terms. Present indications are that the whole dating system, prehistoric, as well as early historic, customarily given for south-western Asia will be depressed. In the chronological study cited, Weinberg finds this tendency will make the equations with Greece all the more reasonable.
Childe's essay implies that the early dark-faced burnished ceramic of south-western Asia must be a manifestation of a discrete assemblage, but at the time he wrote, it was impossible to speak of anything but pottery. In his Grundzüge … Kleinasiens in 1945, Kurt Bittel could do little more than suggest the antecedent rôle of the early Syro-Cilician dark-faced burnished ware to the general burnished sequence of Anatolia. Veronica Seton Williams gave further definition to the pottery and its distribution, as against Christian's rather amorphous ‘Saktschegözü- Stufe’, in her brief catalogue and map of the occurrences of the burnished ware. In 1952, my wife and I prepared a study in which we attempted to delineate what seemed to us to be the separate and distinct ‘essential’ assemblages of the earliest village range in south-western Asia.
page 72 note 1 Annual of the British School at Athens, XXXVII, 1937, 26–35Google Scholar.
page 72 note 2 Weinberg, Saul S., ‘The Relative Chronology of the Aegean …’, 86–107 in Enrich, Robert W., ed., Relative Chronologies in Old World Archeology, Chicago, 1954Google Scholar. To the materials noted by Weinberg should be added V. Milojcic, preliminary report on Otzaki-Magula in Thessaly, Archäologischer Anzeiger, 1954, 2–27Google Scholar, and Furness', Audrey paper on ‘The Neolithic Pottery of Knossos’, Annual of the British School at Athens, XLVIII, 1953, 94–134CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The rather elaborate treatment of handles at Knossos is not an early trait in the Levant.
After the manuscript for this essay was completed, Schachermeyr, Fritz's ‘Die vorderasiatische Kulturtrift,’ Saeculum V (1954), 268–91Google Scholar, came into my hands. This is also an extremely useful study. To my mind, it suffers slightly from the circumstance that Schachermeyr could not focus his western Asiatic materials more precisely in a chronological sense. For example, the items of Vergleichstafels V–6 and VI–1 may be separated by as much as a thousand years.
page 72 note 3 Braidwood, Robert J., et al. , ‘The Iraq-Jarmo Project’, Sumer X, 1954, 120–38Google Scholar.
page 73 note 1 Williams, V. Seton. “Neolithic Burnished Wares in the Near East’, Iraq X, 1948, 34–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Miss Seton Williams' use of ‘Near East’ suggests she might have considered the Egyptian burnished wares as well. She did not do so, and in the present state of knowledge, I suspect she was well advised, but we shall have to face that problem someday.
page 73 note 2 Robert, J. and Braidwood, Linda, ‘The Earliest Village Communities of South-western Asia’, Journal of World History, 1, 1953, 278–310Google Scholar. I do not propose in this more informal essay to repeat all the citations and documentation given in the Journal of Old World History article. The Amouq materials, whose publication is so long overdue, had been at our disposal since 1938. When good opportunity presented itself, and with the final Amouq report still languishing, I contributed ‘A Tentative Relative Chronology of Syria from the Terminal Food-gathering Stage to ca. 2000 B.C. (Based on the Amouq Sequence)’, in Robert S. Ehrich, op. cit., 34–41.
page 73 note 3 Garstang, John, Prehistoric Mersin, Oxford, 1954Google Scholar.
page 74 note 1 Maurice Dunand's ‘Rapport préliminaire sur les Fouilles de Byblos en 1948’ and ‘ditto en 1949’, Bulletin du Musée de Beyrouth, IX, 1949–1950, 53–64, 65–74Google Scholar, and his ‘Chronologie des Plus Anciennes Installations de Byblos’, Revue Biblique, LVII, 1950, 583–603Google Scholar, do not by any means give a sufficiently adequate impression of the bulk and variety of the Byblos occurrence. As of the end of his 1954 campaign, Dunand had exposed at least a thousand square metres of his ‘A’ range, which gives complete substance to the sherds Woolley and Lawrence picked from the ‘sea cliffs’ years ago. Dunand has, in fact, by far the largest exposure yet made of the basal Syro-Cilician dark-faced burnished ware assemblage. We also visited Ras Shamra in February, 1955: none of the staff was present, but the guard showed us a trench of perhaps fifty square metres or more in area which M. Schaeffer is carrying downward into his prehistoric levels. This in itself is no mean exposure, considering the restricted openings made before the war, into this range of materials.
Again, after the completion of the manuscript, I received Dunand's ‘Rapport préliminaire … en 1950,’ ‘ditto en 1951,’ and ‘ditto en 1952,’ Bulletin du Musée de Beyrouth, X (1951–1952), 7–12, 13–20, 21–23Google Scholar. These reports have photographic illustrations of a selection of the architecture, pottery, flint tools and small objects of the pertinent seasons and give a much more adequate idea of the whole assemblage.
page 74 note 2 Figs. 6–10 in Braidwood, Robert J., The Near East and the Foundations for Civilization, Eugene, Oregon, 1952. On figs. 7 and 8Google Scholar, which show the Hassunan and the Syro-Cilician dark-faced burnished ware assemblages, I was not distinguishing the ‘essential’ assemblage as strictly as I am attempting to do here. The black burnished carinated bowl (top, centre) and the flint javelin point (middle, right) on fig. 7 are Syro-Cilician items added to the Hassunan assemblage; the painted and boldly incised pottery (upper, right) on fig. 8 are Hassunan items in the Syro-Cilician assemblage.
page 75 note 1 See his Revue Biblique note, loc. cit., pp. 584–6, fig. 1, and pls. XI–XII.
page 76 note 1 Seton Lloyd, ‘Mound Surveys’, Antiquity, XXVIII, 1954, 214–20
page 76 note 2 James Mellaart, ‘Preliminary Report on a Survey of Pre-Classical Remains in Southern Turkey’ Anatolian Studies, IV, 1954, 175–240.
