Burnt Village

The Burnt Village

At the end of the 1988 campaign a peculiar orange-red layer came to the surface. In 1991 we investigated this phenomenon. To our surprise a well-preserved village was uncovered that had been destroyed by fire around 6000 BC.

Although the architecture is hard to trace because of the fire, it has on the whole been preserved well. Thousands of all kinds of objects were left behind in the Burnt Village: pottery, bone and stone tools, seals, figurines, personal ornaments, etc.

The Burnt Village shows a fairly chaotic settlement, a maze of square rooms and courtyards. On closer inspection a certain order is detected, however. The village consisted of a number of large, rectangular buildings, varying in dimension between 50 and 90 m2. Each building consisted of a series of small, square and rectangular rooms, often no larger than 1 to 2 m2.

The buildings were close together, although we do sometimes find large open spaces and courtyards between them. Many of the small, square rooms had no door; they must have been accessible from the roof.

These rooms were not used for living but for storage usually. In some of the storage rooms we have found large amounts of grain. Others contained large quantities of sealed products, pottery and domestic utensils. Probably the square complexes were central warehouses of some sort, used for storage by large groups of people: herdsmen who wandered the steppe with their families and their herds.

Besides this we have also come across round buildings, the so-called tholoi. From the hearths and domestic utensils it appears that these were used for living. Possibly the 'guards' of the warehouses lived here, that part of the population that lived in the village all year long and depended on agriculture for their living. 

Near the skeletons there were a number of peculiar, large pod-like lumps of clay in which bones of wild sheep were incorporated. It seems as if these 'statues' surrounded the deceased while these were lying on the roof. Are we here dealing with a complex and, to us, bizarre burial ritual? In some modern civilizations people still burn the house when the inhabitant has died.