By around 6000 BC people had moved into the foothills of northernmost Mesopotamia where there was enough rainfall to allow for "dry" agriculture in some places. These were the first farmers in northernmost Mesopotamia. They made Hassuna-style pottery. Hassuna people lived in small villages or hamlets ranging from 2 to. At Tell Hassuna, adobe dwellings built around open central courts with fine painted pottery replace earlier levels with crude pottery. Hand axes, sickles, grinding stones, bins, baking ovens and numerous bones of domesticated animals reflect settled agricultural life. Female figurines have been related to worship and jar burials within which food was placed related to belief in afterlife. The relationship of Hassuna pottery to that of Jericho suggests that village culture was becoming widespread.
Proto-Hassuna
The site of Umm Dabaghiyah, in the same area of Iraq, is believed to have the earliest pottery in this region, and is sometimes described as a 'Proto-Hassuna culture' site. Other related sites in the area are Sotto, and Kul Tepe. Another pre-Hassuna or proto-Hassuna site in Iraq is Tell Maghzaliyah. More recently, the concept of a very early 'Pre-Proto-Hassuna' pottery tradition has been introduced by some scholars. This has been prompted by more recent discoveries of still earlier pottery traditions.
Pre-Proto-Hassuna
Pre-Proto-Hassuna refers to the Late Neolithic period in Upper Mesopotamia when the ceramic containers were just being introduced, and the pottery vessels were still very few in number in these early settlements. At that time, the main emphasis was on the pottery with a mineral temper, as opposed to the plant-tempered pottery which came to predominate later. The time frame for this initial Late Neolithic ceramic period was about 7000-6700 BC, and at this time stone vessels and White Ware were still being used in addition to pottery. Because of the narrow local emphasis in many pottery studies as of now, these earliest pottery traditions may be known in literature as,
Nevertheless, all of these nomenclatures may refer to quite similar types of pottery, depending on some specific geographic region of Upper Mesopotamia.
