Earliest Village?

Human history passed a critical transition when wandering hunters settled down in permanent villages. Archaeologists have reason to believe that this experiment in communal living was made for the first time in Iraq or Iran. Dr. Robert Braidwood of the University of Chicago has reported finding in northern Iraq a village so crude that it seems to be close to the ancient transition point.

Attracted by pottery fragments to a low mound with the native name of M'lefaat, the diggers found relatively recent remains in the upper layers of dirt. Farther down they found something entirely different: filled-in pit houses rather like those that American Indians were building about the time of Columbus. Some of the houses had circular walls of mortarless stone and floors covered with hardpacked pebbles. Inside were crude hearths.

Dug up with the pit houses were stone implements, including axes, mortars and pestles; but more interesting to the archaeologists were the things they did not find. There were no flint-edged sickles, no pottery, no decorative work of any kind. All these items were plentiful in the next-oldest village (Jarmo) that the Chicago diggers found in 1948. 100 miles from M'lefaat. So the people who lived in the pit houses must have been much cruder than the neighboring Jarmo people, who are believed to have founded their village 7,000 years ago.

Dr. Braidwood is not sure whether the pit-house dwellers were truly agricultural. Their mortars proved that they ground some sort of grain, but they may have collected wild seeds instead of planting crops. He hopes to have some sort of answer to this question after the dirt of M'lefaat has been sifted for fragments of grain and other meaningful trifles. Even without this evidence, it looks as if M'lefaat may be one of man's earliest attempts to live in a permanent community.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.