Jarmo

an early Neolithic settlement of the seventh millennium B.C., located to the east of the city of Kirkuk in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The American archaeologist R. Braidwood investigated the settlement from 1948 to 1955. The 7-m thick cultural level is basically formed by the ruins of about 25 multiroom mud-walled houses, which were rebuilt 16 times. Jarmo is the oldest settlement in Mesopotamia with traces of an incipient agricultural economy (grains of wheat and barley were found there). The goat and dog had been domesticated. Hunting still played an important role. The items discovered at Jarmo included flint and obsidian tools (geometric microliths, scrapers, and sickle inserts) and articles made of stone (mortars, milling stones for grinding grain, hoes), bone (awls and ornaments), and unfired clay (figurines of animals and female deities). The vessels in the lower levels were of stone (semi-spherical and conical cups) and those from the upper levels, of clay (cups and goblets with handles).

The Jarmo settlement gave its name to the Neolithic archaeological culture characterizing the beginning of the transition from the appropriative type of economy to the productive, and it is represented by a sequence of remains in Iraqi and Iranian Kurdistan and eastern Mesopotamia.