Tell Banat

Red-Black Burnished Ware has long been identified with mobile pastoraHsts if only because of its wide distribution from the Caucasus to the Levant - two Red-Black Burnished Ware vessels were found in a mid-third-millennium tomb at my own site of Tell Banat on the Middle Euphrates (Porter 1995). But this does not mean that the ware belonged only to mobile groups, or, if the ware is the product of mobile groups, that those groups were external to Arslantepe. The presence of Red-Black Burnished Ware in the building immediately before... 

Both the Upper and Middle Euphrates of the mid-third millennium are now notable for the wealth of burial data retrieved, and this is at least in part because much of it is peculiarly visible. It is also because many of these inhumations, or inhumation fields, have distinctive and localized characteristics. From the platforms and chambers at Gre Virike (Okse 2005), to the aboveground burial mounds at Tell Banat (Porter 2002a, 2007/8), the in-house tombs at Titris Hoyiik (Honga and Algaze 1998 Laneri 2002), the burial enclosure at Umm al Marra (Schwartz 2007), and the mortuary houses of Tell Bfa (Bosze 2009), there is a reason that at this time so many settlements had their own, very particular... 

The White Monument at Tell Banat North. Photo by author. 

Particularly interesting, however, is the situation of this complex, which is set on an artificial platform over two meters tall and made of mud-brick - located, what is more, on a high terrace on the central part of the site (Olavarri and Valdes Pereiro 2001). Qara Quzaq itself is a small, conical mound that stands high in the floodplain of this narrow point in the Euphrates River. It is a local landmark, visible from every direction as one comes across the various passes from the steppe and descends into the valley. It is very similar in overall appearance to the White Monument of Tell Banat North (Fig. 24) and in its visuality within the landscape, albeit on a minor scale, to Jebel Aruda. 

McClellan, T. 1998. Tell Banat North The White Monument. In About Subartu Studies Devoted to Upper Mesopotamia, edited by M. Lebeau, 243-71. Subartu IV/1. Turnhout Brepols. 

Porter, A., and T. McClellan. 1998. The Third Millennium Settlement Complex at Tell Banat Results of the 1994 Excavations. Damaszener Mitteilungen 10 11-63. 

Anne Porter was an assistant professor in the School of Religion, Departments of Classics and Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She served as co-director of excavations at the Tell Banat Settlement Complex, Syria. She has been a visiting research Fellow at both the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University and the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia at Princeton University. 

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