Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie (3(39).2014)

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Ancient Art

much less regular plans and less densely spaced than Houses i and 2, but seem also to have
been built by agglutination. Of special interest was a concentration of hearths at the western
limit of the site, as it may point to functional differentiation of various parts of the settlement.
In 2012, regular exploration began in sector SBH 35, in the eastern part of the site. Still, at
the present state of research, the fullest set of data is available for House 1.

House 1
In the development of House 1, two main phases could be distinguished, each further divided
into a few stages (fig. 12). In the first phase, the unit consisted of three rectangular rooms,
two of which were small (3 x 2.6 m and 0.9 x 2.5 m) and a one larger (5.8 x 3.1 m). Wall bases
of the first two rooms were built of a single row of vertically set sandstone slabs, sunk into
the ground by c. 20-25 cm- A large, long room, rectangular in plan, was added to the eastern
wall of the second small room, its walls founded flush with the older room’s usage level. The
long room’s wall bases consisted of four courses of broken sandstones set in a single row.
The room had two entrances, one by the western end of the southern wall, the other in the
middle of the wall connecting it with the smaller room, the inside of which (in its phase 1
form), has not been excavated yet. In a second stage of the same phase, the room’s floor was
fully covered with large, irregular sandstone slabs. In the middle of the floor, two regular
sandstone slabs were set, with closely fitting shorter sides and leveled tops. They formed a low
podium measuring c. 100 x 40 cm, and c. 20 cm high (fig. 13). Numerous ground and pecked
stone tools, mostly flint or chert drills, and vast quantities of failed tubular beads made of
Strombus shells discarded at various production stages,26 provide direct evidence that the
room functioned as a workshop. In this context, the stone platform may be interpreted as
a working table. The present stage of research and poor state of preservation of the south-
ern part of House 1 do not allow for valid conclusions regarding the presence of the oldest
architectural phase further south.
The second phase brought about substantial change in the functioning and inner divisions
of House i. On the west and south, the house was enlarged by the addition of several rectangular
rooms. After that, House 1 consisted of at least 13 rooms, arranged in three parallel rows, and
reached 11.5 m in length and 8.5 m in width. The plan came to resemble, to a certain extent,
the so-called tripartite plan typical for Ubaid architecture in Mesopotamia. At this point, the
large workshop room was divided into two even parts. However, the two newly-created rooms
had smaller surface area than their predecessor, because they received new northern walls,
which ran c. 40 cm south of the phase 1 workshop wall.
The eastern room was paved with another layer of stone slabs, but it no longer had access
to the working table, the eastern part of which was incorporated into the wall dividing the two
new rooms. A clay spindle whorl was found in this room, indicating that a weaving workshop
may have been located there.
The western room was not paved anew, but had a floor of beaten, sandy earth. The acces-
sible half of the working table was heightened by the addition of another stone slab, and the
room retained its workshop function, as indicated by the discovery of further failed tubular
shell beads and flint or chert drills.

26 The finds from the room included over 100 drills and several dozens of failed tubular shell beads,
amounting to almost half of all such discards found at the site.