Perhaps here, because this kind of archeology is really my specialty, you’ll excuse it if I become personal for a moment. I very much look forward to having further part in closing some of the gaps in knowledge of the Near East. This is not, as I’ve told you, the spectacular range of Near Eastern archeology. There are no royal tombs, no gold, no great buildings or sculpture, no writing, in fact nothing to excite the normal museum at all. Nevertheless it is a range which, idea-wise, gives the archeologist tremendous satisfaction. The country of the hilly flanks is an exciting combination of green grasslands and mountainous ridges. The Kurds, who inhabit the part of the area in which I’ve worked most recently, are an extremely interesting and hospitable people. Archeologists don’t become rich, but I’ll forego the Cadillac for any bright spring morning in the Kurdish hills, on a good site with a happy crew of workmen and an interested and efficient staff. It is probably impossible to convey the full feeling which life on such a dig holds--halcyon days for the body and acute pleasurable stimulation for the mind. Old things coming newly out of the good dirt, and the pieces of the human puzzle fitting into place! I think I am an honest man; I cannot tell you that I am sorry the job is not yet finished and that there are still gaps in this part of the Near Eastern archeological sequence. EARLIEST SITES OF THE VILLAGE FARMERS So far, the Karim Shahir type of assemblage, which we looked at in the last chapter, is the earliest material available in what I take to be the nuclear area. We do not believe that Karim Shahir was a village site proper: it looks more like the traces of a temporary encampment. Two caves, called Belt and Hotu, which are outside the nuclear area and down on the foreshore of the Caspian Sea, have been excavated by Professor Coon. These probably belong in the later extension of the terminal era of food-gathering; in their upper layers are traits like the use of pottery borrowed from the more developed era of the same time in the nuclear area. The same general explanation doubtless holds true for certain materials in Egypt, along the upper Nile and in the Kharga oasis: these materials, called Sebilian III, the Khartoum “neolithic,” and the Khargan microlithic, are from surface sites, not from caves. The chart (p. 111) shows where I would place these materials in era and time. [Illustration: THE HILLY FLANKS OF THE CRESCENT AND EARLY SITES OF THE NEAR EAST]