thumb|[[Tell Barri, northeastern Syria, from the west; this is high, and its base covers ]]
thumb|[[Tel Be'er Sheva, Beersheva, Israel]]
In archaeology, a tell (from , ) is an artificial topographical feature, a mound consisting of the accumulated and stratified debris of a succession of consecutive settlements at the same site, the refuse of generations of people who built and inhabited them, and natural sediment.
Tells are most commonly associated with the ancient Near East but are also found elsewhere, such as in Southern Europe and parts of Central Europe, from Greece and Bulgaria to Hungary and Spain, and in North Africa. Within the Near East they are concentrated in less arid regions, including Upper Mesopotamia, the Southern Levant, Anatolia and Iran, which had more continuous settlement. Eurasian tells date to the Neolithic, the Chalcolithic and the Bronze and Iron Ages. In the Southern Levant the time of the tells ended with the conquest by Alexander the Great, which ushered in the Hellenistic period with its own, different settlement-building patterns. Many tells across the Near East continue to be occupied and used today.
Etymology
The word tell is first attested in English in an 1840 report in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society. It is derived from the Arabic () meaning "mound" or "hillock". Variant spellings include tall, tel, til and tal.
The Arabic word has many cognates in other Semitic languages, such as Akkadian (/). The Akkadian form is similar to Sumerian , which can also refer to a pile of any material, such as grain, but it is not known whether the similarity reflects a borrowing from that language or if the Sumerian term itself was a loanword from an earlier Semitic substrate language. If Akkadian is related to another word in that language, , meaning "woman's breast", there exists a similar term in the South Semitic classical Ethiopian language of Geʽez, namely , "breast". Hebrew first appears in the biblical book of Deuteronomy (c. 700–500 BCE), describing a heap or small mound and appearing in the books of Joshua and Jeremiah with the same meaning.
There are lexically unrelated equivalents for this geophysical concept of a town-mound in other Southwest Asian languages, including in Egyptian Arabic, or (Turkish/), or (Turkish) and chogha (, from Turkish and derivatives etc.).
Equivalent words for town-mound often appear in place names, and the word "tell" itself is one of the most common prefixes for Palestinian toponyms. The Arabic word khirbet, also spelled khirbat (), meaning "ruin", also occurs in the names of many archaeological tells, such as Khirbet et-Tell (roughly meaning "heap of ruins").
Formation
thumb|The [[Citadel of Aleppo, northern Syria, on top of a tell occupied since at least the third millennium BCE]]
thumb|[[Tel Megiddo, northern Israel]]
A tell can form only if natural and man-made material accumulates faster than it is removed by erosion and human-caused truncation, which explains the limited geographical area they occur in.
Tells are formed from a variety of remains, including organic and cultural refuse, collapsed mudbricks and other building materials, water-laid sediments, residues of biogenic and geochemical processes and aeolian sediment. A classic tell looks like a low, truncated cone with sloping sides and a flat, mesa-like top. They can be more than high.
Occurrence
Southwest Asia
thumb|[[Tell Barri, northeastern Syria]]
The earliest known examples of tells are in the Jordan Valley, such as at the 10-meter-high mound, dating back to the proto-Neolithic period, at Tell es-Sultan (Jericho) in the West Bank. More than 5,000 tells have been detected in the Southern Levant, covering Jordan, Israel, and Palestine. Of these, Paul Lapp calculated in the 1960s that 98% had yet to be touched by archaeologists.
In Syria, tells are abundant in the Upper Mesopotamia region, scattered along the Euphrates, including Tell al-'Abr, Tell Bazi, Tell Kabir, Tell Mresh, Tell Saghir and Tell Banat. The last is thought to be the site of the oldest war memorial (known as the White Monument), dating from the 3rd millennium BCE.
Europe
Tells can be found in Europe in countries such as Spain, Hungary, Romania,