Tell (archaeology)

In archaeology, a tell or tel (borrowed into English from تَلّ, tall, 'mound' or 'small hill'), is an artificial topographical feature, a species of mound consisting of the accumulated and stratified debris of a succession of consecutive settlements at the same site, the refuse of generations of people who built and inhabited them, and of natural sediment. Tells are most commonly associated with the ancient Near East, but they are also found elsewhere, such as Southern and parts of Central Europe, from Greece and Bulgaria to Hungary and Spain and in North Africa. Within the Near East, they are concentrated in less arid regions, including Upper Mesopotamia, the Southern Levant, Anatolia and Iran, which had more continuous settlement. Eurasian tells date to the Neolithic, the Neolithic/Chalcolithic, and the Bronze Age/Iron Age era. In the Southern Levant the time of the tells ended with the conquest by Alexander the Great, which ushered in the Hellenistic period with its own, different settlement-building patterns. Many tells across the Near East continue to be occupied and used today. The word tell is first attested in English in an 1840 report in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society. It is derived from the Arabic تَلّ (tall) meaning 'mound' or 'hillock'. Variant spellings include tall, tel, til, and tal. The Arabic word has many cognates in other Semitic languages, such as Akkadian tīlu(m), Ugaritic tl, and Hebrew tel (תל). The Akkadian form is similar to Sumerian DUL, which can also refer to a 'pile' of any material, like grain, but it is not known whether the similarity reflects a borrowing from that language, or if the Sumerian term itself was a loanword from an earlier Semitic substrate language. If Akkadian tīlu is related to another word in that language, til'u, meaning 'woman's breast', there exists a similar term in the South Semitic classical Ethiopian language of Geʽez, namely təla, 'breast'. Hebrew tel first appears in the biblical book of Deuteronomy (ca.