Jarmo

Jarmo lies on the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan, at about 800 m above sea level. Excavated by Robert Braidwood between 1948 and 1955, it is one of the earliest known agricultural villages in the world, occupied from roughly 7090 BCE. The community lived in small mud-brick houses with plastered floors and courtyards; stone tools, clay figurines and bone implements are common, while pottery appears only in the later levels. Emmer and einkorn wheat, barley, lentils and peas were cultivated, and goats, sheep, pigs and cattle were kept. Jarmo was broadly contemporary with Jericho and Çatalhöyük and provides some of the earliest evidence for the transition from hunting and gathering to farming in northern Mesopotamia. Braidwood's multidisciplinary campaign became a model for later archaeological projects. The site was abandoned by the fifth millennium BCE. The villagers built rectangular houses of packed mud and used flint-bladed sickles to harvest grain; grinding stones show how cereals were processed.