The stack of temples is real and is cited everywhere as evidence of continuity, but continuity is an inference from the stack rather than something the stack demonstrates. The excavation belongs to the 1940s, its final report appeared decades later, and no radiocarbon series was run through the sequence. Whether the deposits between one temple and the next represent a few years or several centuries of abandonment is not recorded, and no one has argued the question either way for want of data.
What would resolve this Re-excavation of a limited sounding through the sequence with modern stratigraphic recording, a radiocarbon series taken level by level, and micromorphological study of the intervening deposits for signs of abandonment surfaces. Any one of the three would narrow it; together they would settle it.
OpenNear Eastern archaeology, with stratigraphy, radiocarbon dating and geoarchaeological micromorphology.Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary