Tell (archaeology)

Tell Barri, northeastern Syria, from the west; this is 32 meters (105 feet) high, and its base covers 37 hectares (90 acres)

The Citadel of Aleppo, northern Syria, on top of a tell occupied since at least the third millennium BC

Tel Megiddo (Armageddon)

In archaeology, a tell or tel (borrowed into English from Arabic: تَل, tall, 'mound' or 'small hill'), is an artificial topographical feature formed from the accumulated refuse of generations of people living on the same site. A classic tell looks like a low, truncated cone with sloping sides and a flat, mesa-like top. They can be more than 43 m (141 ft) high.

Tells are formed from a variety of remains, including organic and cultural refuse, collapsed mudbricks and other building materials, water-laid sediments, residues of biogenic and geochemical processes, and aeolian sediment. Tells are most commonly associated with the ancient Near East, but they are also found elsewhere, such as Central Asia, Eastern Europe, West Africa and Greece. Within the Near East, they are concentrated in less arid regions, including Upper Mesopotamia, the Southern Levant, Anatolia and Iran, which had more continuous settlement.

Etymology

Tell has many cognates in Semitic languages, such as Ugaritic tl, Hebrew tel (תל) and Akkadian tillu(m). The Akkadian form corresponds to Sumerian DUL (which can also refer to a 'pile' of any material, like grain), but it is not known whether the similarity reflects a borrowing from that language, or if the Sumerian term itself was a loanword from an earlier Semitic substrate language. If Akkadian tillu is related to another word in that language, til'u, meaning ‘woman’s breast’, there exists a similar term in the South Semitic classical Ethiopian language of Geʽez, namely təla/breast.

There are lexically unrelated equivalents for this geophysical concept in other Southwest Asian languages, including tepe or tappeh (Turkish/Persian: تپه), hüyük or höyük (Turkish), and chogha (Persian: چغا). These often appear in place names and are sometimes used by archaeologists to refer to the same type of sites. The Arabic word khirbet or khirbat (خربة), meaning 'ruin', also occurs in the names of many archaeological tells.

Tell is first attested in English in 1840 in a report in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society. Variant spellings include tall, tel, til, and tal.

An excavation area at Tell Barri, northeastern Syria. Note the person standing in the middle for scale.

See also

• List of tells
• Archaeological site
• Midden
• Mound

Asia portal

Notes and references

References

• Albright, William Foxwell (1949). The Archaeology of Palestine. Penguin Books. pp. 7–22. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Bailey, Douglass; Tringham, Ruth; Bass, Jason; Stevanović, Mirjana; Hamilton, Mike; Neumann, Heike; Angelova, Ilke; Raduncheva, Ana (Winter 1998). "Expanding the Dimensions of Early Agricultural Tells: The Podgoritsa Archaeological Project, Bulgaria". Journal of Field Archaeology. 25 (4): 373–396. JSTOR 530635.
• Bintliff, John (2012). The Complete Archaeology of Greece: From Hunter-Gatherers to the 20th Century A.D. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-118-25520-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Chapman, John (2000). Fragmentation in Archaeology: People, Places, and Broken Objects in the Prehistory of South-eastern Europe. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-15803-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Davidson, Donald A.; Wilson, Clare A.; Lemos, Irene S.; Theocharopoulos, S. P. (2010-07-01). "Tell formation processes as indicated from geoarchaeological and geochemical investigations at Xeropolis, Euboea, Greece". Journal of Archaeological Science. 37 (7): 1564–1571. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2010.01.017. hdl:1893/16434.
• Hirst, K. Kris (22 March 2019). "What Is a Tell? The Remnants of Ancient Mesopotamian Cities". ThoughtCo. {{cite web}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Kotsakis, Kostas (1999). "What Tells can Tell: Social Space and Settlement in the Greek Neolithic". In Halstead, Paul (ed.). Neolithic Society in Greece. Sheffield Academic Press. ISBN 978-1-850-75824-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Leslau, Wolf (1958). Ethiopic and South Arabic Contributions to the Hebrew Lexicon. Vol. XX. University of California Publicans in Semitic Philology. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• MacDonald, Kevin C. (23 November 1997). "More forgotten tells of Mali: an archaeologist's journey from here to Timbuktu" (PDF). Archaeology International. 1 (1): 40–42. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Matthews, Wendy (2020). "Tells in Archaeology". In Smith, Claire (ed.). Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer. pp. 7259–7262. ISBN 978-3-030-30016-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Small, David B. (2019). The Ancient Greeks: Social Structure and Evolution. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-89505-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Suriano, Matthew J. (2012). "Ruin Hills at the Threshold of the Netherworld: The Tell in the Conceptual Landscape of the Ba'al Cycle and Ancient Near Eastern Mythology". 42 (2). Die Welt des Orients: 210–230. JSTOR 23342127. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Wilkinson, Toby J. (2003). Archaeological Landscapes of the Near East. University of Arizona Press. pp. 100–127. ISBN 978-0-816-52173-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Further reading

• Lloyd, Seton (1963). Mounds of the Near East. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press – via Internet Archive.

External links

• Media related to Tells (archaeology) at Wikimedia Commons