Introduction
Tells are archaeological mounds formed by the built-up remains of sequential buildings and deposits from activities and settlement in specific locations within a landscape. These mounds are of particular importance in archaeology and geoarchaeology as they represent not only places of repeated significance and habitation by human communities but also sites in which cultural and bioarchaeological materials are often well preserved due to rapid burial by deposits from subsequent activities and settlement. Tells have often been preferentially selected for archaeological investigation as they are highly visible sites, rising above the surrounding landscape, and they enable study of continuity and change in social and ecological strategies in a particular locale, often over thousands of years, as at Aşıklı Höyük, Turkey (Figure 1). These mounds, however, are only one node and source of evidence in the complex networks, cycles, and histories of communities. Many other sites are...
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Matthews, W. (2017). Tells. In: Gilbert, A.S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Geoarchaeology. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4409-0_148
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