Iraq’s most important Neolithic site, and the earliest agricultural communities in West Asia, excavated by Professor R. J. Brainwood of the university of Chicago in 1948, 1950-51 and again in 1955.
The inhabitants of Jarmo lived in square, multi-roomed houses build of pressed mud, with mud-ovens and baked-in clay basins sunk in the ground. They ate with bone spoons, sewed with bone needles, and their stone spindle-whorls show that they could weave or plait flax and perhaps wool.
Most of the heavy objects lying about in the rooms, such as axes, Celts, saddle-querns, hand-rubbers, mortars, pestles and vases, were made of limestone, often beautifully ground.
These people adored themselves with simple clay of stone necklaces, grooved bracelets of marble and shell pendants, buried their dead under the floor of their houses, and modeled clay figure of animals and of pregnant woman who presumably embodied for them the mysterious forces of fecundity.
Pre-ceramic Jarmo was first dated by radiocarbon tests on snail shells at about 4750 BC, but further tests on charcoal gave higher figure, and c 6750 BC, is a more likely date.
