What is this book?

April 4, 2009 9:56 PM

This is driving me crazy- please don't make email my ex-husband to ask him! He had a slim white hardcover book that in the introduction described an ancient village that was round and built up on top of itself year after year. My old, fallible memory (10 years ago) of it has me believing it was in South America and was not fictional. Any help?
posted by NicoleyDarko to Media & Arts (7 answers total)

It actually sounds like James Michener's The Tell, which is set in the Middle East, and covers snapshots of points in time of the history of different peoples building a village around an ancient well in what is modern-day Israel/Palestine. OTOH, it's not an especially slim book, so perhaps not.
posted by rodgerd at 10:03 PM on April 4, 2009

A tell is actually not necessarily a specific village - many old villages are (or were) built that way! So as you excavate a tell, you first come upon the newest material, and then the older stuff. So I can't help you find this specific book or village, but it's a common archaeological phenomenon. The explanation, I think, is that the site of a community is chosen based on environmental conditions, access to water for transportation and agriculture being the biggest one during a large portion of human history. Hence why so many large cities even today are near rivers.
posted by spaceman_spiff at 10:12 PM on April 4, 2009

Actually, Michener's book was called "The Source" (at least in the U.S.). My favorite Michener novel, a fine fictional overview of mid-eastern history. But probably not the book you're looking for, since it is the opposite of slim.
posted by lhauser at 10:51 PM on April 4, 2009

That sounds a lot like what they found when they excavated Hisarlik.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:15 PM on April 4, 2009

One of the most famous tells is the hill on which Troy is built. Could the book be related to that?

If you're talking a literal tear-down-and-rebuild every year... not a clue, I'm afraid.
posted by Leon at 4:54 AM on April 5, 2009

Tell Beydar, the ancient Syrian city of Nabada, is another famous tell. It's circular, and has several layers of settlements as well.

There was also a "true crime" Indiana Jones-like book written about the Moche site of Sipan (South America), called "The Lords of Sipan" that was fairly popular back in the early 1990:s. Looks like the cover was white.
posted by gemmy at 6:15 AM on April 5, 2009

This could be Irbil in Iraq, although I believe there are other cities in Iraq that might fit your description.
posted by caddis at 6:28 AM on April 5, 2009