Hashbai or Tell Hashbai is an archaeological site on the west of the

Beqaa Valley The Beqaa Valley ( ar, links=no, وادي البقاع, ', Lebanese ), also transliterated as Bekaa, Biqâ, and Becaa and known in classical antiquity as Coele-Syria, is a fertile valley in eastern Lebanon. It is Lebanon's most important ...

Lebanon Lebanon ( , ar, لُبْنَان, translit=lubnān, ), officially the Republic of Lebanon () or the Lebanese Republic, is a country in Western Asia. It is located between Syria to the north and east and Israel to the south, while Cyprus li ...

.Copeland, Lorraine, "Neolithic Village Sites in the South Beqaa Lebanon", ''Melanges de l'Université Saint-Joseph'' (Beirut Lebanon) Volume 45, (Pages 83-114), 1969.
/ref> The area is watered by the

Mount Lebanon Mount Lebanon ( ar, جَبَل لُبْنَان, ''jabal lubnān'', ; syr, ܛܘܪ ܠܒ݂ܢܢ, ', , ''ṭūr lewnōn'' french: Mont Liban) is a mountain range in Lebanon. It averages above in elevation, with its peak at . Geography The Mount Le ...

reservoir A reservoir (; from French ''réservoir'' ) is an enlarged lake behind a dam. Such a dam may be either artificial, built to store fresh water or it may be a natural formation. Reservoirs can be created in a number of ways, including contro ...

s and sits beside the Wadi Hashbai, close to the Ain Hashbai springs. The site is located on the side of the valley as older sites in the central valley have been deeply covered in soil. It was first surveyed and studied in 1965-6 by Lorraine Copeland, Peter Wescombe and

Henri de Contenson 250px, Henri de Contenson Henri de Contenson (4 March 1926 – 8 September 2019) was a French archaeologist and was the Research Director at the CNRS, The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Center for Scientific Research), a ...

. Materials found included burnished, red-washed shards of pottery (some with incision decoration),

arrowheads An arrowhead or point is the usually sharpened and hardened tip of an arrow, which contributes a majority of the projectile mass and is responsible for impacting and penetrating a target, as well as to fulfill some special purposes such as s ...

, sickle blades with coarse denticulation,

obsidian Obsidian () is a naturally occurring volcanic glass formed when lava extrusive rock, extruded from a volcano cools rapidly with minimal crystal growth. It is an igneous rock. Obsidian is produced from felsic lava, rich in the lighter elements s ...

basalt Basalt (; ) is an aphanite, aphanitic (fine-grained) extrusive igneous rock formed from the rapid cooling of low-viscosity lava rich in magnesium and iron (mafic lava) exposed at or very near the planetary surface, surface of a terrestrial ...

rubber and a

limestone Limestone ( calcium carbonate ) is a type of carbonate sedimentary rock which is the main source of the material lime. It is composed mostly of the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of . Limestone forms whe ...

pestle. suggested PPNB or

Neolithic The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several parts ...

dating similar to

Tell Ramad Tell Ramad ( ar, تل رماد) is a prehistoric, Neolithic tell at the foot of Mount Hermon, about southwest of Damascus in Syria. The tell was the site of a small village of , which was first settled in the late 8th millennium BC. The tell was ...

, Byblos or

Amuq The Amik Valley ( tr, Amik Ovası; ar, ٱلْأَعْمَاق, al-ʾAʿmāq) is located in the Hatay Province, close to the city of Antakya (Antioch on the Orontes River) in the southern part of Turkey. Along with Dabiq in northwestern Syria ...

with occupation as late as the

Bronze Age The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in some areas, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second pri ...

. A dark brown and black

flint Flint, occasionally flintstone, is a sedimentary cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz, categorized as the variety of chert that occurs in chalk or marly limestone. Flint was widely used historically to make stone tools and start fir ...

group of later appearance was also detected. It was suggested that if this flint group were to belong with the production period for

Dark Faced Burnished Ware Dark faced burnished ware or DFBW is the second oldest form of History of pottery in Palestine, pottery developed in the western world the oldest being Dotted wavy line pottery from Africa. It was produced after the earliest examples from the ind ...

or red-washed pottery, then it may carry an even earlier PPNB date. Along with evidence from

White Ware White Ware or "Vaisselle Blanche", effectively a form of limestone plaster used to make vessels, is the first precursor to clay pottery developed in the Levant that appeared in the 9th millennium BC, during the pre-pottery (aceramic) neolithic per ...

in the area, this has suggested that the Beqaa sites are of a sub-group suggested to date earlier chronologically than finds from Byblos.

References

{{Portal, Lebanon, History, Asia 1965 archaeological discoveries Neolithic settlements Archaeological sites in Lebanon Pre-Pottery Neolithic B