Collapsed beams and wooden remains from a 3200 BC temple and palace at Arslantepe (Malatya, Turkey)

Pinus is viewed as the best, but we have hypothesised that it was probably less available than the other trees in the area around the site, as it is not very abundant. The fact that oak was used very little for the construction of the palace and temple, is possibly due to the small dimensions of oak at that time, or other properties or meanings that we, today, do not appreciate.; At Arslantepe in the final centuries of the Late Chalcolithic period (3350-3000 BC) there was evidence of a massive boost given to the system of centralising and redistributing goods. It was in this period, coeval to the Late Uruk phase in Mesopotamia, that a huge monumental public architectural complex was built. Because of its division into sectors with different functions and different architectural features (temples, stores, areas for discarding administrative materials, a courtyard, corridors), it may be considered to be the first known example of a “palace” to have been discovered in the whole of the Near East, with areas set aside for performing the main public religious and secular functions. Two temples were excavated, of which the second one, temple B, consisting of two small entrance rooms, a main big room, and in the adjacent corridor was found, with a large amount of big charred wooden beams, some posts and other wooden structures or objects in situ. More than two hundred samples of charcoal have been recovered in the temple B area and identified as wood of Alnus, Pinus, Juniperus, Populus, Ulmus, Fraxinus, Crataegus, deciduous Quercus. Also some monocotyledonous structures of reeds ascribable to Arundo, which were probably used for the roofs constructions, were found. Neither Alnus, probably preferred for its high trunks, nor Populus, probably locally abundant, are generally considered as a good timber for construction