Tell Aswad

A 5-hectare Neolithic mound on a branch of the Barada, 48 kilometres east of Damascus, at the eastern end of the village of Jadidat al-Khass. Mud brick was invented here. The mound itself lies beyond a field boundary: no sign, no ticket, no keeper — and all of the finds are in the National Museum of Damascus.

Getting there

48 kilometres east of Damascus. The mound is at the eastern end of Jadidat al-Khass; you have to ask in the village where it is, because finding it alone is hard. The road is flat and short. The real question is knowing what you are looking at when you arrive.

How long it takes

An hour, which covers the top of the mound and the ground around it; the excavation is not laid out to be visited.

What to see

What you see on the surface is a rise and some stone. The value of the site sits in the excavation reports. Henri de Contenson found the mound in 1967 and dug it in 1971 and 1972. When the date of the first published Aswad culture turned out to be too early for the region, Frederic Abbes re-examined the lithic series. Between 2001 and 2006 a French mission directed jointly by Danielle Stordeur and Bassam Jamous dug the mound again over six seasons. New radiocarbon dates removed the early phase altogether: the settlement was occupied in two phases, 8700-8200 and 8200-7500 BC.

Mud brick was invented here

In the first phase the walls were built by layering earth with reeds. Then lumps of earth were shaped on reed bedding and turned into brick, raw at first and dried later. Mud brick did not appear at once but through a run of attempts, and that run can be read here. The houses are round, elliptical or polygonal from beginning to end, and partly sunk below ground; the doors mostly face east.

What most people miss

The museum. More than 100 well-preserved burials were found on the mound: at first inside and around the houses, in the later phases in a separate cemetery outside the village. On 9 skulls from two areas the flesh had been cleaned away, the face modelled in lime plaster directly on the bone, and painted. Obsidian brought from Anatolia, the imprint of woven cloth on a fragment of plaster, and flint arrowheads of the Aswad and Jericho types also came from here. The study of all of it continues at the museum in Damascus; going to the mound means seeing the place, no more.