Societies without boundaries. Interpreting Late Neolithic patterns of wide interaction and sharing of cultural traits: The case of the Halaf communities

The paper attempts to interpret the widespread circulation of items, customs, and ideas among the Neolithic communities of the Jezira and surrounding regions, with particular reference to the Late Neolithic groups bearing the Halaf culture, as a peculiar pattern of interaction among “open” communities. This circulation, in fact, is not to be seen, in the author’s opinion, as the result of trade activities, though the Halaf, and Neolithic communities in general, certainly exchanged goods making them travelling over long distances. But it may rather be the result of a special kind of social – and economic/political – interaction establishing stable relationships among tribal groups, whose territories were not yet defined in terms of precise borders, probably in the absence of a political concept of territory.