LEVANT 36 2004 Pp. 1-11 More Seals and Sealings from Neolithic Tell Sabi Abyad, Syria Peter M.M.G. Akkermans 1 and Kim Duistermaat 2 ' Netherlands National Museum of Antiquities, P.O. Box 11114, 2301 EC Leiden, The Netherlands 2 Netherlands Institute of Academic Studies Damascus, P.O. Box 36103, Damascus, Syria Recent excavations at Tell Sabi Abyad in northern Syria yielded a number of stone stamp seals and clay seatings from well-stratified Neolithic contexts, dating c. 630Ö-6000 Be. This report presents the new finds and relates them to the prehistoric seals and many hundreds ofsealings previously found at the site. Extensive excavations at the Neolithic site of Tell Sabi Abyad in the Balikh valley, Syria (Fig. 1) in the early 1990s yielded hundreds of clay sealings as well as a number of stone stamp seals, all dating from about 6000 BC or shortly afterwards (NB: all dates in this article are calibrated dates BC). These finds vastly expanded the corpus of prehistoric seals and sealings known till then and encouraged new thoughts on the origin and use of these items as a means of control over property (Duistermaat 1996; Duistermaat and Schneider 1998; Akkermans and Duistermaat 1997). This short article offers a supplement to our ear- lier reports and focusses on the clay sealings and stone stamp seals newly found at Tell Sabi Abyad in recent seasons of excavation, i.e. in the field cam- paigns of 1996 to 2002. Altogether nine new stamp seals and sixteen new sealings were discovered. With the exception of some prehistoric seals found out of their original context in Bronze-Age layers, they all date from about 6300-6000BC. Seals and sealings from the Burnt Village It seems useful to recall that almost all of the sealings found in the early 1990s came from the level 6 settle- ment or 'Burnt Village', a well-established community with large and closely spaced rectangular buildings and many small tholoi, which ended in a conflagration around 6000 BC. Together with a concentration of miniature vessels, tokens, discs, figurines and so on, the sealings seem to have been deposited in a few rooms in a few storehouses only, a kind of 'archive' avant la lettre (Akkermans and Duistermaat 1997; Verhoeven 1999; but see Jackson 2002 for a differ- ent view, interpreting the 'archives' as middens). Most of the sealings (12 pieces out of 16) discovered at Sabi Abyad in more recent years stem from the Burnt Village too, but, contrary to the earlier finds, they were found primarily in debris layers outside the architecture, not in the buildings themselves. Seven of the sealings were found together with masses of animal bones and pottery sherds in our trenches sunk into the extensive garbage dumps and ash deposits that were over 1.5 m. high and stretched over an area of several hundred square metres on the outskirts of the Burnt Village, on the north-eastern slope of the mound. The sealings were found in separate layers in the refuse accumulation, suggesting that the discard occurred repeatedly over a prolonged period of time. These sealings must have been thrown away on a number of occasions when the settlement was still in full swing, and therefore they must pre-date (to a probably relatively short extent) the masses of sealings found in the storehouses set on fire at the very end of the exis- tence of the Burnt Village. Assuming that the sealings were all used for the same purpose, i.e. the control of goods (personal property) stored in the repositories (Akkermans and Duistermaat 1997), it seems likely that the sealings from the dumps were used in earlier storage events (in previous years or seasons). Once the stored goods were reclaimed, the broken sealings lost their meaning and were simply discarded. Although it is not always possible to identify the sealed object, it appears that the newly found level 6 sealings are mainly associated with small, trans- portable containers such as coiled baskets (n = 5) and pottery vessels (n = 1; the rim diameter is 6.5 cm.). The reverse of five sealings show the imprints of irregular straws or bundles of straw, but it is unclear what kind of container this might have been. A few 1