El Kowm or Al Kawm is a circular, 20 km (12 mi) gap in the Syrian mountains that houses a series of archaeological sites.

It shows some of the longest and most important cultural sequences in the Middle East,[1] with periods of occupation by humans for over 1 million years.

van Loon and R. H. Dornemann with a 3 by 50 metres (9.8 by 164.0 ft) trench at El Kowm I; a large Neolithic tell about 3 hectares (7.4 acres) in size.

[5][6] Further surveys and fieldwork were carried out from 1980 onwards by Jacques and M.-C. Cauvin, Lorraine Copeland, Francis Hours, Jean Marie Le Tensorer and S. Muhesen.

[7] In 2005, the team from the University of Basel found over forty fossilized bone fragments from a mammoth camel dating as far back as 150,000 years at the Hummal site in El Kowm, a new species of camelid.

[11] Danielle Stordeur excavated El Kowm II more recently and dated this to the Neolithic as far back as c. 7000 BC.