PARIS Archaeological excavations at a Syrian neolithic site will wind up soon, before a new dam puts the historic remains at the bottom of a deep lake. Wind up in the next few weeks because a new dam at Tishrin will come into operation soon and the historic remains will disappear to the bottom of what will become a 50-foot deep lake.

The Jerf-el-Ahmar site, occupied between the end of the 10th and the beginning of the ninth millennium BC, is situated north-west of the city of Aleppo, not far from the Turkish border. The digs there form part of a major operation to salvage artefacts from the floor of the Euphrates Valley ahead of gradual flooding over three years from October to fill the Tishrin barrage.

The site at Jerf-el-Ahmar will be threatened from next winter because it is low-lying, said Danielle Stordeur, director of the Franco-Syrian archaeological mission at the French National Scientific Research Center. Its disappearance makes me sad because it's a major spectacular site. The great discovery of the 1998 was the unearthing of a communal dwelling, sunk into the ground, a large-scale, round building for collective use and storage, she said.

Human remains were discovered inside, including a skeleton without skull, stretched out on the floor of the main room, and a skull placed in a corner. For the 1999 dig we will explore two other communal dwellings that we have identified, Stordeur said. Since its first excavations in 1995 the Franco-Syrian team has garnered vital information for the understanding of the process known as neolithization, in which prehistoric societies changed from hunter-gatherers into village settlers who developed their environment by domestication of plants and animals.

Some 30 complete houses on 10 levels of villages have been laid bare, opening the way to analysis of the historic changes in first primitive dwellings from round building to rectangular house. Another striking discovery was a burnt-down dwelling containing carbonized remains of barley and lumps of food containing cereals, the oldest neolithic evidence of food preparation. The inhabitants of Jerf-el-Amar lived on cereals, including barley, einkorn a variety of wheat and leguminous plants.

It appears that they had started to cultivate at least part of their plant resources. At that time, the climate was more humid and cold than today and the vegetation was more like that of a damp steppe, partly forested. Study of animal remains revealed that the early settlers hunted gazelle, asses and wild oxen. Several other burnt-down dwellings had collapsed immediately, enabling archaeologists to reconstruct their architecture in its totality.

One revealed a kind of snapshot image of the activities going at a moment of precipitate flight, with millstones, bowls and polished stone plates left beind. In 1996 the archaeologists discovered stone slabs engraved with schematic signs, pictograms suggesting messages dating from several thousand years before writing was invented. The archaeologists have named these idea traps, since their role may have been that of a kind of aide-memoire, containing allusions to narratives perhaps with a mythical or initiatory purpose.

I remain cautious about the significance of this discovery, said Stordeur. We didn't find any other stones in subsequent excavations, and we haven't made much progress in studying what we have. (AFP)