Abu Hureyra
Located on the Middle Euphrates of northern Syria, Abu Hureyra provides us with one of the most important case-studies into the origins of cereal domestication in the Fertile Crescent, spanning the Epi-Palaeolithic to earliest Neolithic (more information here). The site was originally excavated in the 1970’s by Prof. Andrew Moore, now of the Rochester Institute of Technology, prior to its flooding by a damming project; it now lays under Lake Assad.
The now submerged tell of Abu Hureyra (Photo Source: A.M.T Moore).
Collaboration
Working in collaboration with the Royal Ontario Museum, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and the Manchester Museum of the University of Manchester the MAX Lab is currently sourcing obsidian from strata that span the Epi-Palaeolithic to later Neolithic (PPNC) to locate the community within larger regional exchange patterns as a means of reconstructing those networks of socio-economic interaction through which the various new ideas and practices we have come to term ‘the Neolithic’ came to be constituted (download the poster here).