In archaeology a tell or tel (borrowed into English from Arabic: تَلّ, tall, "mound" or "small hill")^[1] is an artificial topographical feature, a mound^{[lower-alpha 1]} consisting of the accumulated and stratified debris of a succession of consecutive settlements at the same site, the refuse of generations of people who built and inhabited them and natural sediment.^{[2][3][4][lower-alpha 2]}

Tells are most commonly associated with the ancient Near East but they are also found elsewhere, such as Southern and parts of Central Europe, from Greece and Bulgaria to Hungary and Spain^[5][6] and in North Africa.^[2][7][8][9] Within the Near East they are concentrated in less arid regions, including Upper Mesopotamia, the Southern Levant, Anatolia and Iran, which had more continuous settlement.^[10] Eurasian tells date to the Neolithic,^[11] the Chalcolithic and the Bronze and Iron Ages.^[12] In the Southern Levant the time of the tells ended with the conquest by Alexander the Great, which ushered in the Hellenistic period with its own, different settlement-building patterns.^{[citation needed]} Many tells across the Near East continue to be occupied and used today.^[13]

The word tell is first attested in English in an 1840 report in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society.^[14] It is derived from the Arabic تَلّ (tall) meaning "mound" or "hillock".^[1] Variant spellings include tall, tel, til and tal.^[15]

The Arabic word has many cognates in other Semitic languages, such as Akkadian tīlu(m), Ugaritic tl^[16] and Hebrew tel (תל).^[17] The Akkadian form is similar to Sumerian DUL, which can also refer to a pile of any material, such as grain, but it is not known whether the similarity reflects a borrowing from that language or if the Sumerian term itself was a loanword from an earlier Semitic substrate language.^[18] If Akkadian tīlu is related to another word in that language, til'u, meaning "woman's breast", there exists a similar term in the South Semitic classical Ethiopian language of Geʽez, namely təla, "breast".^[16] Hebrew tel first appears in the biblical book of Deuteronomy 13:16 (ca 500–700 BCE),^[19] describing a heap or small mound and appearing in the books of Joshua, and Jeremiah with the same meaning.^{[citation needed]}

There are lexically unrelated equivalents for this geophysical concept of a town-mound in other Southwest Asian languages, including kom in Egyptian Arabic,^[20] tepe or tappeh (Turkish/Persian: تپه), hüyük or höyük (Turkish) and chogha (Persian: چغا, from Turkish çokmak and derivatives çoka etc.).^[21] These often appear in place names,^[15] and the word itself is one of the most common prefixes for Palestinian toponyms.^[22] The Arabic word khirbet, also spelled khirbat (خربة), meaning "ruin", also occurs in the names of many archaeological tells, such as Khirbet et-Tell (roughly meaning "heap of ruins").^[23]

A tell can only be formed if natural and man-produced material accumulates faster than it is removed by erosion and human-caused truncation,^[4] which explains the limited geographical area they occur in.^{[original research?]}

Tells are formed from a variety of remains, including organic and cultural refuse, collapsed mudbricks and other building materials, water-laid sediments, residues of biogenic and geochemical processes and aeolian sediment.^[24] A classic tell looks like a low, truncated cone with sloping sides^[25] and a flat, mesa-like top.^[26] They can be more than 43 m (141 ft) high.^[21]

• List of tells
• Acropolis
• Archaeological site
• Midden