Mesopotamia's first farming villages may lie buried beneath river silt
The Ubaid period, running from about 6500 to 3800 BC, gives us the oldest known settlements on the southern Mesopotamian plain, the land that later became Sumer. But archaeologists suspect even older villages lie hidden under deep layers of river mud; one key site was found only by accident.
The name comes from Tell al-'Ubaid, first dug by Henry Hall in 1919 and then by Leonard Woolley in 1922 and 1923. Its hallmark is pottery painted black on a buff background. At a 1930 conference in Baghdad, scholars treated the Ubaid, Eridu and Hajji Muhammed pottery styles as so different that they must represent separate ethnic groups arriving in turn. That view did not survive. In 1960 Joan Oates showed the styles all belonged to one Ubaid tradition and divided it into phases, now usually counted from Ubaid 0 to Ubaid 5.
Timing varies by region. In the south the culture spans roughly 5500 to 3800 BC in its main range, and the whole period from about 6500 BC, before giving way to the Uruk period; in the north it lasted only from about 5300 to 4300 BC, following the Halaf culture. Ubaid pottery has turned up across a vast area, from Mersin in Turkey to the Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia, with strong regional differences, so researchers no longer see it as a single uniform culture. Precise dates are hard to pin down because southern Mesopotamia has yielded few radiocarbon results.
Digs since the 1970s have transformed the picture. The Hamrin region yielded a complete settlement at Tell Abada, and Tell el-'Oueili revealed layers older than Eridu, pushing back the first known occupation of lower Mesopotamia. At H3 in Kuwait, contact with Mesopotamia comes with the earliest evidence of seafaring anywhere in the world.
The landscape was wetter then. Plant remains at 'Oueili point to wetlands, date palms grew in the south long before farmers domesticated them, and the Persian Gulf shoreline crept north over some two and a half millennia to reach Ur around 4000 BC. Oak vanished roughly as Ubaid culture spread outward, prompting a suggestion that hunting for good timber drove the expansion.
Source: Ubaid period
