The arid margins of northern Syria, recent results

Awad Nazir (1) , Mohamed Al-Dbiyat (2) , Jacques Besançon , Bernard Geyer (2) , M.-O. Rousset (2)

1 DGAM - Directorate-General for Antiquities and Museums
2 Archéorient - ARCHEORIENT - Environnements et sociétés de l'Orient ancien

The Arid Margins of Northern Syria have been the object of a geoarchaeological survey which ended in 2010 after 16 field campaigns. It allowed to discover and to characterize more than 1000 archaeological sites, which were all replaced in their environmental context. The aim was to understand the complexity of the Human – environment relations in notoriously difficult environments and to redraw the history of a region with early sedentarisation where the influence of the environment upon development of the human societies has been important very early. The poster presents the way we proceeded to synthesize the environmental data and our knowledges about settlement, land use and development. This stage is essential to understand the economic models on which societies of the past based themselves to become established and develop in regions marked by strong constraints, the first of which being aridity. But, generally, only the climatic aridity is put forward to explain the modalities of land use, what distorts widely the conclusions to which one can end. We looked at ways to introduce, on one hand, realities of the edaphic aridity and, on the other hand, consequences of the human endeavour, in particular hydro-agricultural installations, to manage to define and to map classes of attractiveness at the scale of the surveyed region. This approach revealed itself particularly interesting for the Early Bronze Age IV and for the byzantine period which will be illustrated.

Mots clés: Peuplement; Environnement; Holocene archaeological sites; Syrie du Nord

Domaines: Archéologie et Préhistoire

Awad Nazir, Mohamed Al-Dbiyat, Jacques Besançon, Bernard Geyer, M.-O. Rousset. The arid margins of northern Syria, recent results. International Syrian Congress on Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, Dec 2015, Beyrouth, Lebanon. 2015. ⟨halshs-01257150⟩