I bring this up in part because it’s super-neat, but also because I’ve encountered quite a few people who mistakenly believe that agriculture is intrinsically destructive of the environment and thus unsustainable. I’ve seen a few people argue that soil erosion and exhaustion are the inevitable consequences of any agriculture at all, or perhaps of the sort of grain-centered agriculture we’re so familiar with today, responsible for the repeated collapse of multiple societies, and that farmers must either move frequently to exploit new environments or die out.

And here these farmers sat, year after year, millennia after millennia, in one place. These were people working with the same Neolithic agricultural package, growing the same sorts of wheat and raising the same sorts of sheep, in the fields around their tells.

They did not die out. They did not exhaust their soils to extinction. Many of them—especially the tells in the Danube Basin that constitute “Old Europe”—developed no states, as some people believe is inevitable from wheat cultivation. If they did leave, they left for reasons unrelated to the success of their way of life. But, as I noted, some of these tells are still inhabited, like the central citadel of Aleppo in Syria.

We don’t have to wonder if there’s something intrinsically destructive about the process of agriculture in general. They did it. They lived it. They are the proof.

Interestingly, the same word exists in Hebrew as well, and is half of the city name of "Tel-Aviv".

@Mux

Yup! Lots of tells in Israel and Palestine.