What we have found

Buildings, floors and repeated actions

Excavations documented houses, open spaces, hearths and many episodes of construction and maintenance. Later mudbrick houses include carefully arranged internal areas and repeated plaster surfaces. These remains help establish how space was used and how successive households returned to particular locations. Earlier phases require their own description: the expanded sequence includes structures unlike the better-known mudbrick buildings.

Plans and photographs become meaningful when read with their phase and context. A red floor, an animal-bone installation and a rebuilding episode do not automatically share one date or explanation. The houses guide introduces this way of reading architectural evidence.

Food and the surrounding world

Charred plant remains, animal bones and other environmental evidence reveal a varied economy. Limited crop use accompanied the exploitation of wild resources and wetland habitats. The 2018 research paper brings these observations together to explain a durable form of small-scale food production. An isolated seed is informative, but a repeated pattern across carefully sampled deposits is much stronger evidence.

Objects and materials

The material record includes obsidian tools, beads, worked materials and clay objects. Non-local raw materials illuminate wider connections, while manufacturing traces reveal choices made by craftspeople. Microscopic and chemical analysis of early clay vessels supports deliberate firing of some of the rare pottery. Their presence does not mean that ceramic pots dominated daily life.

People and relationships

Human remains permit carefully framed research into biological relationships, movement and life histories. Some people were buried beneath house floors; genetic relationships and shared burial locations can be compared, but they do not provide a complete household census. Our guide to burials and kinship explains why these individuals should be discussed as people, with the limits of each method made clear.

A finding can change as excavation extends or analysis improves. The 2022 report, for example, revised an initial impression that Building 22 was unusually large. Evidence and interpretation shows why such revisions are a normal and valuable part of research.

Keep a finding connected to its record

When following a particular object or sample, look for its context, phase and analytical history. A photograph can show form, but may not show where the item lay or whether it was moved before deposition. A published result may concern a selected sample rather than the whole assemblage. These distinctions do not make objects less interesting. They make it possible to ask better questions about them and to explain why an ordinary fragment can carry more reliable information than an impressive object without a known context.