The Earliest Neolithic of Iran: 2008 Excavations at Sheikh-E Abad and Jani
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The Earliest Neolithic of Iran: 2008 Excavations at Sheikh-E Abad and Jani

2008 Excavations at Sheikh-E Abad and Jani

Wendy Matthews, Yaghoub Mohammadifar, Wendy Matthews, Yaghoub Mohammadifar

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The Earliest Neolithic of Iran: 2008 Excavations at Sheikh-E Abad and Jani

2008 Excavations at Sheikh-E Abad and Jani

Wendy Matthews, Yaghoub Mohammadifar, Wendy Matthews, Yaghoub Mohammadifar

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Over a period of several millennia, from the Late Pleistocene to the Early Holocene (c. 13, 000-7000 BC), communities in south-west Asia developed from hunter-foragers to villager-farmers, bringing fundamental changes in all aspects of life. These Neolithic developments took place over vast chronological and geographical scales, with considerable regional variability in specific trajectories of change. Two vital and consistent aspects of change were a shift from mobile to sedentary lifestyles and increasingly intensive human management of animal and plant resources, leading to full domestication of particular species. Building on earlier campaigns of archaeological investigation, the current phase of the Central Zagros Archaeological Project is designed to explore these issues in one key region, the Zagros zone including central west Iran. Two Early Neolithic mounds were excavated: Sheikh-e Abad in the high Zagros and Jani, in the foothills of the Mesopotamian plains, each comprising up to 10 m depth of deposits indicating occupation spanning over 2000 years, and providing great scope for diachronic and spatial analyses. These two sites make major contributions to knowledge regarding the origins of sedentism and increasing resource management in Southwest Asia, and associated developments in social, cultural and ritual practices in this formative region of human cultural development.

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Publisher
Oxbow Books
Year
2013
ISBN
9781782972242
Topic
Storia

1. FROM HUNTER-FORAGER TO FARMER-HERDER IN THE CENTRAL ZAGROS: RESEARCH CONTEXT, ISSUES, AND METHODS

Roger Matthews, Yaghoub Mohammadifar and Wendy Matthews
Research context
The transition from hunter-forager to farmer-herder is one of the most significant episodes in the human past, as recognised by decades of research conducted into this issue across the world (Harris 1996; Mithen 2003; Barker 2006; Zeder 2006a; Zeder and Smith 2009). Within the global picture, there is agreement on the special significance of Southwest Asia in the earliest developments in this transition. Over a period of several millennia, from the Late Pleistocene to the Early Holocene (c. 13,000–7000 BC), communities in this broad region developed from hunter-foragers to villager-farmers, bringing fundamental changes in all aspects of life, changes that were to lay the foundations for subsequent socio-cultural structures in human society, including urbanism and the rise and fall of empires (R. Matthews 2003). These Neolithic developments took place over vast chronological and geographical scales, with considerable regional variability in specific trajectories of change. Two vital and consistent aspects of change, however, were a shift from mobile to sedentary lifestyles and increasingly intensive human management of animal and plant resources, leading in many cases to full domestication of particular species. The current phase of the Central Zagros Archaeological Project (hereafter CZAP) is designed to explore these issues in one key region of Southwest Asia, the Zagros zone including central west Iran.
In the 1950s–70s the Zagros region of Iran and Iraq (Fig. 1.1) was a major focus of investigations into early sedentism, animal domestication, and agriculture, led by the pioneering work of Robert Braidwood (1960; 1961; Braidwood et al. 1983), as these ‘hilly flanks’ were suspected to be one of the heartlands of wild species that were later domesticated. Following Braidwood’s excavations at Jarmo in the Iraqi Zagros and at Asiab and Sarab, near the modern city of Kermanshah, Iran, archaeologists continued to investigate aspects of Neolithic life in the Iranian Central Zagros at Ganj Dareh (Smith 1976; 1990), Guran (Meldegaard et al. 1963; Mortensen 1972) and Abdul Hosein (Pullar 1990), while developments to the south were explored through projects at Ali Kosh (Hole et al. 1969), Chogha Sefid (Hole 1977) and Chogha Bonut (Alizadeh et al. 2003). Well to the north, in Iranian Azerbaijan, the site of Hajji Firuz (Voigt 1983) added another aspect to the still fragmentary picture of Neolithic societies in western Iran. Active archaeological investigation of this region, as elsewhere in Iran, came to a halt by 1980, to be slowly re-started over the past ten years (for overviews see Abdi 2001; Azarnoush and Helwing 2005).
Investigations prior to 1980 had enabled tentative reconstruction of a picture of Neolithic developments in western Iran with several distinctive features (Hole 1987a). Firstly, Early Neolithic communities of the region were most productively viewed within a long time-span of development, with considerable evidence for continuity of practice and behaviour, such as an emphasis on goat exploitation and the persistence of stone tool technologies (Kozlowski 1996; 1999), reaching well back into the Epipalaeolithic and Palaeolithic of the region (Hole 1996; R. Matthews 2000). Secondly, however, more detailed exploration of the chronology of the Neolithic of the Zagros (Hole 1987b; Voigt and Dyson 1992), suggested that the region’s generally high altitudes and severe climate may have precluded the presence of significant numbers of humans in the centuries of the earliest Neolithic, during and following the Younger Dryas. Thirdly, ongoing study of subsistence practices in the Iranian Zagros stressed the special role of the region in the earliest stages of intensification in goat exploitation, with evidence from animal kill-off patterns and herd profiles for management of captive herds, morphologically wild but arguably in process of early domestication (Hesse 1984; Zeder 1999; 2005b; 2006b; Zeder and Hesse 2000), an interpretation supported to some extent by recent DNA studies on the origins of domesticated goat (Naderi et al. 2008). Fourthly, some commentators (Bernbeck 2001; 2004; Pollock et al. 2010) pointed to an apparent dearth of evidence for elaborate cultic and ritual practices within the Iranian Neolithic, in contrast to other regions of contemporary Southwest Asia such as the Levant and Anatolia, where Early Neolithic societies appeared to have been more richly engaged with elaborate cultic and symbolic practices, which Cauvin (1994) and Hodder (1990) argue were key elements in social cohesion and complexity. Finally, an associated proposal was that, partly due to its severe topography, the upland Zagros zone was largely isolated from outside contact and somewhat resistant to change during the Neolithic (Kozlowski 1999; Kozlowski and Aurenche 2005).
image
Fig. 1.1. Map to show location of region and key Neolithic sites.
Since the cessation of active fieldwork in Iran from 1979 (Abdi 2001), until recently, the archaeology of the Zagros has not benefited from the level of attention devoted to other regions of Southwest Asia, including the Levant and Anatolia, leading to a major imbalance in our current understanding of the Neolithic and its regional variations across the Fertile Crescent, as commented by many authors (Barker 2006: 146; Hole 1987c: 27; Kozlowski and Aurenche 2005: 20; Zeder 2006c). Since 2000 a resurgence of fieldwork in Iran has provided a new opportunity to reintroduce the Zagros evidence into the academic arena. This resurgence has been led by Iranian archaeologists working from the Iranian Centre for Archaeological Research and Iranian universities (Azarnoush and Helwing 2005), and has also seen collaborative projects with non-Iranian partners, including CZAP. Investigations into the Neolithic of all of Iran, not solely the Zagros zone, are steadily emphasising the role of Iran in the dramatic developments that characterise the early millennia of the Holocene era (R. Matthews and Fazeli Nashli 2013; Weeks et al. 2006).
The current phase of CZAP investigates the Early Neolithic of the Central Zagros, c. 10,000–7000 BC. The project involves excavation at two mound sites, 90km apart, in order to compare upland and lowland ecology and social and economic practices. The upland mound of Sheikh-e Abad, at the village of Kurtavij near Miyan Rahan on the Sahne plain, was discovered during regional survey by Yaghoub Mohammadifar and Abbass Motarjem of the Department of Archaeology, Bu Ali Sina University, Hamedan. Sheikh-e Abad is in the high cooler Zagros, 1430m above sea level, in a fertile plain with 3000m-high peaks. The mound of Jani was identified in Abdi’s survey of the Islamabad plain (Abdi 2003: 414: site 117). It lies in the lower, warmer Zagros, the foothills of the Mesopotamian plains, 1280m above sea level, in valleys with 1500m-high ridges, close to the village of Humeyl south of Islamabad town. Each site comprises 8–10m depth of occupation deposits covering c. one hectare, making them four times larger in area than the nearby excavated Neolithic site of Ganj Dareh (Smith 1990). Radiocarbon dates from Sheikh-e Abad indicate occupation spanning over c. 2200 years from c. 9810 to 7600 BC, providing great scope for diachronic and spatial analyses. Dates from Jani are suggestive of a similar duration of Early Neolithic occupation but also with artefact evidence for continued occupation into the ceramic Neolithic (Abdi 2003: 414; Pollock et al. 2010: 9). Excavations in 2008 demonstrated that the two sites under excavation make major contributions to knowledge regarding the origins of sedentism and increasing resource management in Southwest Asia, and associated developments in social, cultural and ritual practices.
The special significance of the two sites lies in their extremely early dates, their long duration of occupation, the rich evidence for cultic practice, and the scope for deep and open-area investigations. Their location on the most important route-way through the Zagros Mountains, later the Great High or Khorasan Road and western reaches of the Silk Road, enables investigation of east-west movements of peoples, materials, ideas and social and economic practices during a period of dramatic ecological and socio-cultural change. The location of Sheikh-e Abad in the high Zagros and of Jani in the low Zagros enables detailed systematic comparison between two contemporary communities of Early Neolithic western Iran, that share many material culture traits, such as lithic, ground-stone, and worked bone technologies, but with significant potential for regional diversity. Sheikh-e Abad lies in the heartland of wild goat country and can be expected to inform on the earliest stages of goat management and domestication, while Jani, in the open rolling country to the west, is more in the heartland of wild sheep, and has the potential to enlighten us on a different pathway to early stock-keeping. When work once more becomes possible at these sites, multiple other points of contrast and comparison between the two communities will be articulated and explored as the project develops, including material engagement, architecture and sedentism, seasonality, social identity and networks, and ritual practices, as these have proven central to understanding Neolithic developments elsewhere in Southwest Asia (Hodder 2006; Watkins 2010).
Research issues: sedentism, resources, chronology
Sedentism, society and ritual
The fundamental role of sedentism in the Neolithic transition has long been argued (Bar-Yosef 2001). While it has been increasingly realised that sedentism and agriculture are related but distinct components of this transition, each requires independent study on its own terms. Within the context of Early Neolithic southeast Europe, Whittle (2003: 40) has argued for a flexible approach to the issue of early sedentism in the archaeological record, with an awareness of a “spectrum of variation, from tethered mobility to short-term sedentism”, while stressing the often highly-charged significance of place and locale for repeated, seasonal visits by human communities long before permanent sedentism is practiced. Whittle draws on Chapman’s (1997) idea of places as ‘timemarks’, with rich, deep-time associations for regionally dispersed communities, who create and reinforce their sense of identity, as individuals and as social actors, through repeated regular assemblies at specific locales in the landscape.
Of special importance here is the rich evidence for the sedentarisation of Neolithic communities long before full domestication of farmed plants and animals is attested. A number of questions therefore arise. How and over what time-spans did early settlements develop from being seasonal and temporary to year-round and permanent, and how can this issue best be approached archaeologically? How were early settlements constructed and socialised, and how significant were cult and ritual in social transformations in the Zagros Neolithic? Early interpretations stressed environment and subsistence in transformations from hunter-foraging to farmer-herding but there has also been emphasis on social, ritual, and symbolic shifts in Neolithic communities, and a consideration of the emergence of households and territories as fundamental drivers of social change (Bogucki 1999).
The issue of seasonality of occupation needs careful examination, utilising multiple strands of evidence, including plants and fauna, in particular through bones of small vertebrates and birds, as practiced in the pioneering studies of Tchernov (1984; Bar-Yosef 2001) in the southern Levant. On the basis of kill-off patterns of wild goat, Bökönyi (1972) suggested that Asiab, recently re-dated to between c. 9300–8500 BC (Zeder 2006b: 193), was occupied between February and April and also occasionally between August and April, while the later site of Sarab, now dated to between c. 7000–6400 BC (Zeder 2006b: 195), was occupied year-round. Hesse’s (1982) study of the kill-off patterns in goat bones from Asiab suggested that the site was occupied in the late autumn when bachelor herds and nursery herds of wild goat mixed together for the only time in their annual movements. Occurrence of migratory birds, including goose, crane and heron, in the earliest levels at Guran, dated to between c. 7700–7200 BC (Zeder 2006b: 195), suggests repeated winter occupation at the site (Mortensen 1972: 295). Year-round sedentism from level D upwards at Ganj Dareh is suggested by the presence of bones of the house mouse, Mus musculus (Hesse 1979), while goat bones from level E, the earliest level, indicate spring/summer hunting of nursery herds of female and young goats, with the site abandoned during the winter months (Hesse 1982). There is clearly great potential for articulating patterns of seasonal movement and resource use in the Early Neolithic not only at the site level but also at different elevations in the Zagros arc and more broadly across wide regions.
It is beyond doubt that sedentism developed in Southwest Asia before animal-herding and agriculture. The ecological and social strategies that enabled hunter-forager sedentism and that supported Early Neolithic settlements in which diverse resources and hunting remained important, however, are poorly resolved (Roberts and Rosen 2009). The earliest levels at Sheikh-e Abad and Jani comprise middens, rich in plant and animal remains, and fire-cracked stones from cooking, with fragments of early architecture, suggesting that communities were repeatedly gathering at specific locales, for eating and socialisation, before settling more permanently in villages. What factors affected the change from seasonal to more permanent modes of sedentism in the Zagros? To what extent did sedentism lead to increased pressure on locally available resources, including wild goat herds (Zeder 2006b: 202), that may have triggered a step-change in human engagement with those resources?
Hole (1987a: 83; see also Weeks et al. 2006) has commented on the tendency of Early Neolithic sites in western Iran to cluster in distinct but widely separated groups across the landscape, and has argued that the clustering attests a need for human communities to maintain sustainable population sizes, with a pool of marriage partners available for each settlement cluster. On the basis of anthropological study, Hole proposes a minimum figure of 500 people in order for communities to sustain themselves in the long term, and he suggests that clusters of early settlements are likely to share material culture attributes in proportion to their sharing of a genetic pool. Within the Central Zagros zone, can such material connections be identified and can they be associated with clustering of contemporary sites, as Kozlowski (1999) has proposed regarding lithic assemblages, for example? Furthermore, what might have been the role of large-scale social gatherings, perhaps including feasting (Hayden 2009), in constructing and sustaining a sense of social identity for Early Neolithic Zagros communities, and how might we approach possible evidence for feasting in the archaeological record?
Both Sheikh-e Abad and Jani have evidence of increasingly complex architecture and, less clearly, material engagement through time, including use of clay figurines and tokens and fired-lime. The construction and preservation of multiple intact floors, within and outside buildings, with associated artefacts and bioarchaeological remains, enables analysis of space-by-space activities and construction of boundaries, as well as understanding of seasonal and longer term changes in ecological and social strategies, through the application of contextual microarchaeological approaches (W. Matthews forthcoming). In CZAP we are generating new insights into the dynamic histories of buildings and settlements, and the social practices that shaped them, through microstratigraphic and micromorphological analysis of sequences of architectural surfaces and activity residues in specific rooms and areas, including targeted use of large resin-impregnated thin-sections. By these means we aim to address Braidwood’s (Braidwood et al. 1983, 10) characterisation of Neolithic Jarmo as providing “no really good evidence that might specify the use to which the various rooms in a given house were put” (W. Matthews 2012). The extremely rich contextual information available at Neolithic sites in Southwest Asia, in the form of multiple sequences of intact activity surfaces and materials thereon, should not be underestimated as an archaeological resource, especially when we contrast this richness with the almost complete absence of intact floors and primary activity residues from Neolithic sites across all of Europe, for example (Whittle 2003: 134).
Finally, the Neolithic Zagros has been viewed as lacking evidence for ritual (Bernbeck 2004), but the 2008 CZAP excavations revealed impressive evidence for r...

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