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A Radiocarbon Date from Choga Mami

There are two reasons for the regrettable shortage of radiocarbon dates for prehistoric Mesopotamia. One is that much of the relevant excavation took place before the development of such techniques; the second, the inconvenient fact that the prehistoric farmers of Mesopotamia were uncommonly tidy and swept clean their house floors, leaving for posterity little in the way of carbonized or any other remains. Excavations like that at Ras al ‘Amiya failed to reveal any recoverable quantity of charcoal in spite of a diligent search, while at Choga Mami, where every scrap of such material was preserved, many of the samples have proved too small for dating purposes. In this situation it is perhaps useful to publish quickly and briefly the first date from the latter site, remembering at the same time the unreliability of a single unsupported date from any site: The charcoal sample which produced this date came from what has been termed, perhaps inadequately, the “Transitional Samarra/Hajji Muhammad phase”, so designated because the ceramic material included pottery comparable, and in some cases identical, with ceramic types of these two otherwise distinct assemblages. Although some of the pottery is indistinguishable from that found in true Samarran context, there is no doubt that this phase at Choga Mami clearly post-dates classical Samarra.