Houses divided: The stratigraphy of Khafajeh’s ED III residential neighbourhoods around the Oval Temple

International audienceThe site of Khafajeh, excavated by the Oriental Institute of Chicago’s team in the 1930s, constitutes until today the backbone for the periodization of central Mesopotamia for the 3rd millennium BC.However, the archaeological levels of the Houses quarter have been the subject of intense debate since the 1980s, especially both from an urbanistic and a regional periodization perspective.Over the last 15 years, new chrono-stratigraphic interpretations of the site and Houses quarter as well have been possible thanks to the unpublished plans and excavation notebooks provided by the DiyArDa database of the Oriental Institute.This set of new data and its interpretations make it possible to propose a new solution to major stratigraphic problems raised by the ensemble constituted by the oval temple and the residential neighbourhoods that surround it