Tell Arpachiyah and Tepe Gawra, two sites located in the Mosul region of Iraq, together provide the basis for much of Northern Mesopotamian prehistory. Excavations by Sir Max Mallowan at Tell Arpachiyah in 1933 and by the University of Pennsylvania at Tepe Gawra between 1932 and 1938 produced the key ceramic sequences for the Halaf and northern ‘Ubaid cultures in particular. Halaf and ‘Ubaid pottery subsequently excavated at other sites in northern Iraq and in Syria and Turkey as well has, as a general rule, been interpreted in terms of Arpachiyah and Gawra ceramic sequences. It therefore seems worthwhile to re-examine the early pottery of these two important sites using the recently developed technique of neutron activation analysis. A carefully designed programme of neutron activation analyses would provide a new perspective on the Tell Arpachiyah and Tepe Gawra pottery and could perhaps answer some important questions about the Halaf and ‘Ubaid cultures in the Mosul region and beyond.

Firstly, activation analysis offers a method for correlating more directly the Arpachiyah and Gawra prehistoric sequences on the basis of pottery imports. The analysis of Halaf potsherds from sites in the Khabur headwaters region has already demonstrated that painted pottery was being traded there on a considerable scale by the latter part of the Halaf period. It seems likely that pottery could also have been traded between Tell Arpachiyah and Tepe Gawra from quite early on since the two mounds are separated by a distance of only twenty-five kilometres. If the pottery exported from one of these sites could be identified by neutron activation analysis at the other site, then the degree of temporal overlap between the prehistoric occupations of the mounds could be better assessed.