Communities and Monuments in the Making: Neolithic Tells on the Great Hungarian Plain (2022). In: First Kings of Europe: From Farmers to Rulers in Prehistoric Southeastern Europe, edited by Attila Gyucha and William A. Parkinson. UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, Los Angeles. (original) (raw)

RCHAEOLOGISTS IN EUROPE use the Arabic word tell to refer to a specific kind of archaeological site that grows up vertically over time. 1 From northern Africa through southwestern Asia and into southeastern Europe, tell sites were created at many different times throughout prehistory and in historic times. 2 Tell sites are created when people live on the same piece of land for hundreds or thousands of years-for example, a large section of the modern city of Tel Aviv is a tell site that has been occupied for millennia. Archaeologically, tell sites tend to be associated with sedentary farming populations that built houses made of mud brick or wattle-and-daub, a kind of adobe technique. Because the walls of these houses are made of mud, they are relatively short-lived and need to be renewed or reconstructed regularly. Sometimes they are deconstructed or burned and rebuilt on the same spot. Other times, they are abandoned and rebuilt somewhere else on the settlement. When built on the same spot, prior to reconstruction, a new settlement layer is laid down by leveling the old house