The Earliest Neolithic of Iran: 2008 Excavations at Sheikh-E Abad and Jani: Central Zagos Archaeological Project, Volume 1

By Oxbow Books

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Nov 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781782972242

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For a period of six weeks, from 20th July till 30th August 2008, the Central Zagros Archaeological Project (CZAP) team conducted excavations at the two Early Neolithic sites of Sheikh-e Abad and Jani in Kermanshah province, western Iran. Fieldwork was directed by Dr Yaghoub Mohammadifar of the Department of Archaeology, Bu Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Professor Roger Matthews then of UCL Institute of Archaeology, and Dr Wendy Matthews of the Department of Archaeology, University of Reading. Dr Abbass Motarjem of the Department of Archaeology, Bu Ali Sina University, Hamedan, co-directed the work at Jani as well as investigating several caves and rock shelters of the Kurtavij region. The team comprised specialists and students from all three universities as well as from the University of Tehran (Fig. 0.1).

We wish to thank for their kind support Dr Hashemi and Dr Mosavi, Directors of Research, Iranian Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organisation (ICHHTO), as well as the Government of the Province of Kermanshah. We are sincerely indebted to Dr Hassan Fazeli Nashli, Director of the Iranian Centre for Archaeological Research (ICAR) in 2008, for his support and encouragement at all stages of the project. We were greatly assisted by the Kermanshah and Islamabad offices of ICHHTO, in particular in Kermanshah by the Director, Mr Beyramvand, and by Mr Said Dustani and Mr Sohrabi, and in Islamabad by Mr Rashnou, and by Dr Leila Khosrawi representing the ICAR, Tehran. Major funding support from the UK was awarded by the British Academy (BARDA-48993), and additional support was provided by the British Institute of Persian Studies (2007 survey season), the University of Reading, UCL Institute of Archaeology, and Bu Ali Sina University, Hamedan. We are very grateful to all our supporting institutions. At UCL Institute of Archaeology we are thankful for helpful input and advice from Dr Louise Martin, Yvonne Edwards and Dr Sue Colledge. Sincere thanks also go to Dr Cameron Petrie for his guidance in seeing this volume through to publication, to Dr Amy Richardson for production assistance, to Mehdi Daryaie for translation of several sections of the report, and to Dr Mary Lewis for advice on Chapter Fourteen. Thanks are also due to Richard Sabin and Paula Jenkins, both of the Natural History Museum, for access to the caprine and bird reference collections, and to Pavel Weinberg, of the North Ossetian Nature Reserve, for advice on caprine skulls. We are also very grateful for professional assistance and expert input from colleagues at Oxbow Books, especially Julie Gardiner, Lizzie Holiday, Val Lamb and Sam McLeod.

Fig. 0.1. CZAP 2008 team.

Accommodation and work space in the 2008 season were kindly provided in two schools in Kurtavij village (Fig. 19.1), and we are grateful for all the logistic support we received from the villagers, in particular Hamed Darakhshani. We thank the ICAR and ICHHTO for permission to export samples for micromorphological, geochemical, phytolith and isotope analysis, and for radiocarbon dating. We thank the excavation team members for all their hard work and contributions to CZAP. Details of the team for the 2008 season are in the table below.

Local workers from the villages of Kurtavij and Humeyl were also employed.

This volume is a report on a single season of fieldwork at Sheikh-e Abad and Jani in the summer of 2008. Since completion of the field season many post-excavation analyses have been conducted, most of them reported on here. Further reports, information and illustrations can be found at the project website (www.czap.org). A four-year phase of CZAP began in January 2011 as an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project entitled ‘Sedentism and resource management in the Neolithic of the Central Zagros’.

All dates cited in this volume are calibrated BC, unless otherwise indicated. Colour versions of most of the figures featured in this volume can be found on the enclosed CD.

Fig. 0.2. CZAP 2008 visitors.

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).

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 ritual practices, including a cultic building, elaborate human burials, and extensive use of red ochre. Should we therefore revisit the notion that Early Neolithic communities of the Zagros were not heavily engaged in symbolic and cultic transformations during this episode of dramatic change?

Resource management

What were Early Neolithic economic and food practices, and how best do we investigate hunting, management, and domestication of wild goat, which were clearly a vitally important resource of the upland Zagros region? Initial results suggest a distinctive pathway in foodways and animal management somewhere between hunter and herder for the Central Zagros. Communities focused on accessible resources including goat, lentils, and pistachio/almond (Charles 2007; Charles et al. 1998), while expanding their diet to include snails, fish, and birds, and use of sheep, cows, pigs and deer, all wild (Bökönyi 1977). Whether the diversity of wild seeds present relates to broadening of human diet and intensified collection and management of plants or to deposits from animal dung burnt as fuel (Miller 1996), however, requires integrated palaeobotanical and micromorphological investigation of food and fuel (W. Matthews 2010).

Climatic factors need consideration as regards patterns of sedentism and resource management in the Early Neolithic, and clearly the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene and the Younger Dryas are major episodes of climate change, with severe alterations in temperature as one of the most significant factors. The Lake Zeribar evidence indicates an overall temperature increase of up to 8–12°C between c. 12,500 and 9000 BC (Hole 1996: 275; van Zeist 2008: 81), leading to dramatic shifts in environmental conditions of all regions, with particularly marked impact in upland zones, such as the high Zagros, that had previously been deep under snow and ice for much or all of the year. As Hole (1996: 275) has pointed out, such a temperature rise, both at the start of the Bølling-Allerød interstadial, and at the end of the Younger Dryas, would have enabled the rapid spread of grasslands and high pasturage across the Zagros, in turn allowing the spread of the wild sheep and goat herds that ate the grass, and of the human hunter-foragers who hunted the sheep and goat. Here we may consider the possibility of human use of fire (Lewis 1972; modified by comments of Hillman 1996) as a mechanism for reduction of brush-land and regeneration of grasslands through long time-spans, as a deliberate strategy in sustaining pasture for hunted, and perhaps managed, herds of sheep and goat. In this connection, it is notable that evidence for Early Holocene, and Pleistocene, human use of fire in landscape management appears to be attested throughout the 48,000-year Lake Zeribar core sequence in the form of charred fragments of herbaceous plants (Wasylikowa 2005; Wasylikowa et al. 2008: 321), although we should keep in the mind the possibility of natural bush-fires caused by lightning strikes, a common phenomenon in the high Zagros, most frequently in the spring (Lewis 1972: 203). Recent archaeological survey of the Marivan plain has indeed detected many sites of Palaeolithic, Neolithic and Chalcolithic date in close proximity to Lake Zeribar (Mohammadifar and Motarjem 2008).

With the reversion to a colder, drier climate during the Younger Dryas, from c. 10,900 to 9600 BC (Bar-Yosef 2001: 16), and the potential retreat of the vegetation and animal dispersals that had previously been underway, human communities may have needed to develop their ecological strategies in new directions in order to continue to survive and thrive. One feature of that renewed strategy may have been the intensification of modes of control over the food supply, including increased concern with maintenance and care for herds of hunted animals. At the conclusion of the Younger Dryas, and the renewed onset of warmer conditions, a developed expertise in animal and plant management provided a platform for a steady expansion and intensification of agricultural and stock-keeping capabilities, early stages in the full Neolithic transition to village-farming. Intriguingly, increased levels of human control over wild goat herds, including centuries-long episodes of demographic control and protection of some populations of bezoars in the wild, before the isolation of the true early domestic herds by humans have been proposed as an explanation for haplotype patterns in the DNA of modern wild goat populations of Southwest Asia (Naderi et al. 2008: 17662; Luikart et al. 2001).

Hole’s (1996: 276) suggestion that domesticated sheep/goat and cereals were introduced contemporaneously into the Zagros from the foothills to the west can be tested against the Zagros evidence. Re-analysis of goats from Ganj Dareh, in the Central Zagros, confirms their managed status and their dating as one of the world’s earliest food-animal domesticates, c. 7900 BC, on the basis of age and sex kill-off patterns (Zeder 2006b). Microscopic herbivore gut spherulites from multiple contexts at Sheikh-e Abad and Jani indicate early management and possible penning of goat/sheep by c. 8000 BC. The absence of domesticated, and rarity of wild, cereals in CZAP 2008 samples suggests that intensified goat management may have developed here before significant cereal use, in contrast to the Levant (Horwitz 1989; Garrard et al. 1996).

Hesse (1984: 260) has argued that it was a desire for animal dung, as a fuel for cooking and heating, that led to the taming and penning of goats within human settlements, suggesting that wild herds were accustomed to human society through the provision of salt licks, an essential component of ungulate diet. The long duration of occupation at Sheikh-e Abad, and the good survivability of charred wood and plant remains, as well as the suitability of new approaches to detection and analysis of ancient dung and plant remains, including integrated GC/MS, phytolith and micromorphological analysis enables exploration of such potential shifts in use of fuel materials for cooking and heating, as well as plants more widely, by high-precision micro-contextual analysis of diverse plant materials and their depositional pathways and taphonomy (W. Matthews 2010; Shillito et al. 2011b).

In exploring the issue of domestication, as Zeder (2006a; 2006b; Zeder and Hesse 2000) has repeatedly argued, we need to move beyond concerns with morphological indicators of shifts from wild to domesticated, as there may be a delay of more than 1000 years in their visibility, and significant local and regional variation in animal size, for example. This is especially the case in the Early Neolithic Zagros where human-plant-animal engagements were clearly undergoing significant changes prior to any clear morphological impacts on individual species. In addition to demographic and social approaches to issues such as goat herding and management, we need to explore every available avenue in the archaeological record, including the rich evidence from micromorphology and archaeological chemistry relating to animal penning and dung distribution within distinct rooms and buildings. Pursuit of these approaches may dissolve a polarised view of the natural world as either ‘wild’ or ‘domesticated’, shifting attention to what Ingold (1996: 21) has articulated as the relative scope of human involvement in establishing the conditions for growth as the critical factor in distinguishing between hunting and husbandry, gathering and cultivation. At the same time we must consider the potentially wide variation in human, animal and plant interrelationships. This includes development of social and culinary approaches to archaeological evidence (Hastorf 1998; Hesse and Wapnish 2002) which, in the case of goat and sheep for example, takes account of every stage in the animal management process, including herding and penning, fodder and birthing, slaughter, butchery and storage, food preparation and cooking, eating and feasting, and waste disposal. All our archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological remains have potential to be considered in this light.

How were human communities impacted by, and how did they structure, changing relationships with the plant and animal worlds around them? Recent studies have emphasised the social nature of animals in their own right, persuasively arguing that researchers need to consider human-animal sociality alongside the role of animals in relationships between humans (Orton 2010: 189). There can be no doubting that Early Neolithic Zagros people lived in a world full of animals, to use Whittle’s felicitous encapsulation of Neolithic Europe (2003: 87). While as archaeologists we are keen to discern the boundaries between wild and domesticated, and to explore their archaeological signatures, it is highly unlikely that the Neolithic peoples of the region categorised animals in this way. Of more significance will have been the nature of relationships between types of animals and people, even between individual animals and individual people, and the very act of managing and tending to animals will have helped recurrently to re-structure that relationship. To quote Ingold (1996: 22), There is thus a sense in which people and their domestic animals grow old together, and in which their respective life-histories are intertwined as mutually constitutive strands in each other’s lives. Orton (2010: 194) makes a complementary point about the intertwining of human and animal lineages through the anthropologically well-attested practice of gift-giving, particularly as bride-wealth, of animals during major human life events. Nor should we ignore the tremendous potential for generating new types of animal-human engagement afforded on the human side by children and their concern with pet-keeping and on the animal side by special individuals such as lame or outcast animals that may seek closer than habitual human protection.

Chronology of change

What is the chronology of change in the Zagros Early Neolithic, and how does high-resolution evidence develop our understanding of sedentism and resource management in Southwest Asia? In the broader scheme of change across the region, where on the time-chart do developments in the Zagros lie? Chronological charts constructed by specialists in the Neolithic of Southwest Asia are characterised by large bands of uncertainty in the segment devoted to the Early Neolithic of the Zagros and suggest periods of discontinuity (e.g. Mellaart 1975: table 1; Hole 1987b: fig. 1; Cauvin 1994: 20–21; Kozlowski and Aurenche 2005: fig. 0.2; Bernbeck 2001: Tab. 1), but how real are these apparent gaps? It has been argued that the upland Zagros was devoid of humans, indeed of goats, for much of the Early Holocene because of adverse climate (Hole 1996: 267). Recent discovery of Early Neolithic sites in several regions of Iran (R. Matthews and Fazeli Nashli 2013; Tsuneki and Zeidi 2008), however, suggests that the Zagros and the Iranian plateau played a more important role in Early Neolithic transformations than previously suspected, but a fuller chronological framework needs to be established and contextualised, as there are few reliable modern radiocarbon dates (Hole 1987b; Voigt and Dyson 1992). New radiocarbon dates in the tenth millennium BC for the lowermost levels at Sheikh-e Abad, now the earliest Neolithic site in Iran and amongst the earliest in Southwest Asia, indicate occupation as early as the latter part of the Younger Dryas, from c. 10,100–9450 BC, suggesting that apparent gaps in human presence in this region may indeed be illusory, and were due to the sparsity of excavated and dated sites.

Establishing a secure chronology for the Early Neolithic of the Zagros enables consideration of the differential rates and patterns of change through the Neolithic across Southwest Asia. As the dating security increases, the more clearly we can discern a mosaic pattern of developments throughout the Fertile Crescent, with an emphasis on early cereal and plant domestication in the southern Levant (Colledge and Conolly 2008) and on goat and sheep exploitation in the Zagros and Upper Euphrates regions (Conolly et al. 2011). While the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) A–C chronological system employed in the Levant, for the period 9800–6400 BC, is currently difficult to apply in the context of the Zagros, partly due to local and regional differences in material culture, including for example, the early date of pottery at Ganj Dareh, c. 8100–7900 BC, we may nevertheless hope that as more radiocarbon dates are obtained more detailed and large-scale comparative studies will be facilitated.

In the meantime, throughout this volume we propose to define the Early Neolithic period of the Zagros as spanning c. 9800 to 7000 BC, eschewing use of the term Proto-Neolithic for the earlier part of this time-span (Hole 1987b; Tsuneki and Zeidi 2008), a term which suggests a pre-destiny in the transition from hunter-forager to villager-farmer. Moreover, as it becomes clearer that socio-cultural continuities, as well as local variations, abound through the period in question, with early steps towards intensified resource use and sedentarisation attested from 10,000 BC onwards, it makes less and less sense to impose divisive chronological schemes.

Summary aims and objectives CZAP 2008

There were three major aims for the CZAP 2008 season. The first was to investigate the nature and development of early settlement and architecture in the Zagros, through surface survey, mapping and geophysics at both sites. These sites are amongst the largest known in the Neolithic Zagros, at c. 130 × 90m across and 8–10m high.

The second aim was to study evidence of environment and human, plant and animal interrelations through targeted excavation on both mounds. Key issues include whether goats were locally domesticated, and whether sheep and domesticated cereals were introduced from more lowland areas to uplands. Indicators of periodicity and seasonality are examined for the early levels in particular, to establish whether these are seasonal or year-round occupations. A key objective has been to develop an integrated ecological and contextual approach to the study of domestication, including analysis of animal and plant indicators, and the roles of hunting and gathering within early sedentary agriculture. Investigations of indicators of animal management, prior to changes in bone morphology, for example, will include micromorphology and phytolith analysis of traces of animal dung, diet and pens, as well as dung used as fuel.

The third aim was to establish a secure chronological framework, through study of lithics and radiocarbon dates, in order to understand internal site chronologies as well as inter-site and interregional interactions and comparative developments within Southwest Asia more broadly. Key issues include an apparent gap of several millennia between the latest Upper Palaeolithic sites of the Zagros and the earliest Neolithic sites, and the need for precise dating of contexts likely to host the earliest goat