Tell (archaeology)

In archaeology, a tell (from Arabic: تَلّ, tall, 'mound' or 'small hill')[1] is an artificial topographical feature, a mound[a] 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 natural sediment.

[2][3][4][b][c] Tells are most commonly associated with the ancient Near East but are also found elsewhere, such as in Southern and parts of Central Europe, from Greece and Bulgaria to Hungary and Spain,[5][6] and in North Africa.

[12] 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.

[23] A tell can form only if natural and man-made material accumulates faster than it is removed by erosion and human-caused truncation,[4] which explains the limited geographical area they occur in.

[21] It is thought that the earliest examples of tells are in the Jordan Valley, such as at the 10-meter-high mound, dating back to the proto-Neolithic period, at Jericho in the West Bank.

Chapman envisaged the tell as witness to a nucleated communal society, whereas Halstead emphasized the idea that they arose as individual household structures.