Fauna

Neolithic fauna research

In the ruins of the buildings and in the open courtyards we have found loads of everyday rubbish several metres thick that the village inhabitants had left behind in and around the settlement. While excavating we carefully collect the bone material that is found in the ground.

We take soil samples in order to examine charred seeds and vegetable remains. Thus we may form a detailed picture of the way in which the prehistoric inhabitants of the Balikh valley provided for themselves: how they handled wild and domesticated animal species and what cereals and wild plants they used. Unique information indeed!

Important cereals were wheat and barley. Besides these cereals the inhabitants of Tell Sabi Abyad ate lentils, various kinds of peas and they knew coriander. They kept a number of animals in and around the village: sheep and goats, pigs and cattle.

However, the analyses of the excavated bone material show a number of important changes. For example, the cattle gradually became somewhat smaller in size and pigs were slaughtered at an earlier age in the course of time. Likewise the slaughtering age for sheep and goats changed. Apparently the emphasis in animal husbandry increasingly shifted from the meat to the side-products, especially milk.

In spite of the major role of domesticated animal species, hunting remained important at Tell Sabi Abyad. If you visit the Syrian steppe today, you'll see a region that, from an ecological point of view, is only a weak reflection of the prehistoric period. Most wild animals have become extinct or are about to.

In the 7th and 6th millennia BC they were, however, still present in large quantities: the aurochs, the wild sheep and the goat, wild boar, several kinds of deer, the hyaena and even the brown bear! Popular animals for hunting were especially the gazelle and the onager. All kinds of small game were intensively hunted as well, for example the fox and the hare. At the time the banks of the Balikh river were densely overgrown and provided shelter for various waterloving and well-edible animals like turtles, frogs, fish and shellfish.