Ghassulian

[1][5] The Ghassulian stage was characterized by small hamlet settlements of mixed farming peoples, who had immigrated from the north and settled in the southern Levant: today's Jordan, Israel and Palestinian territories.

[3] People of the Beersheba culture (a Ghassulian subculture) lived in underground dwellings, a unique phenomenon in the archaeological history of the region, or in trapezoidal houses of mud-brick.

[3][6] Their pottery was highly elaborate, including footed bowls and horn-shaped drinking goblets,[3] indicating the cultivation of wine.

[citation needed] Several samples display the use of sculptural decoration or of a reserved slip (a clay and water coating partially wiped away while still wet).

[6] Settlements belonging to the Ghassulian culture have been identified at numerous other sites in what is today southern Israel, especially in the region of Beersheba, where elaborate underground dwellings have been excavated.

[3][6] Ghassulian, a name applied to a Chalcolithic culture of the southern Levant, is derived from the eponymic site of Teleilat (el) Ghassul, northeast of the Dead Sea in the Great Rift Valley.

Thus, Chalcolithic settlements have been discovered in the Jordan Rift Valley, in the Israeli coastal plain and on its fringes, in the Judaean Desert, and in the northern and western Negev.

[6][8] It is hard to determine the time of the Ghassulian settlement in the region, and whether or not they had evolved out of local, pre-Ghassulian, populations (such as the Besorian culture).