‘Seek, and you shall find’: a new era at the dawn of domestication and sedentism in Early Neolithic Iran Abbas Alizadeh∗ ROGER MATTHEWS, WENDY MATTHEWS & YAGHOUB MOHAMMADIFAR (ed.). The earliest Neolithic of Iran: 2008 excavations at Sheikh-e Abad and Jani. Central Zagros Archaeological Project, volume 1 (British Institute of Persian Studies Archaeology Monographs 4). xiv+249 pages, 158 b&w illustrations, 42 tables, CD. 2013. Oxford & Oakville (CT): Oxbow; 9781-78297-223-5 hardback £40.
cultural development sounds simple and linear, the two books under review here show the complexity of this process through the exposition of an array of different trajectories that resulted in the first phase of sedentism in early Neolithic Iran.
ROGER MATTHEWS & HASSAN FAZELI NASHLI (ed.). The neolithisation of Iran: the formation of new societies (BANEA Themes from the Ancient Near East 3). viii+296 pages, numerous b&w illustrations, and tables. 2013. Oxford & Oakville (CT): Oxbow; 9781-78297-190-0 paperback £38. There are two incomparable developments in the long evolutionary history of the human species which paved the way for social, economic and political advances. The first was the domestication of certain species of plants and animals that freed humans from complete reliance on what environment and geography dictated. This control over subsistence resources allowed and encouraged humans to settle in small villages between 10 000 and 7000 BC across much of the ancient Near East. Living a settled life with reliable food sources led to an increase in population, creating a context for the development of social complexity. In less than 3000 years, this new way of life led to the second profound development: the formation of early state organisations, which crystallised in the late fourth and early third millennia BC in Egypt, southern Mesopotamia and Susiana, south-western Iran. But, while this brief description of human *
This promising beginning was brought to an abrupt end by the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The fragmentary and uneven picture of early Neolithic life in highland Iran that had emerged suggested to Frank Hole (1998) a 2000-year hiatus (10 000–8000 BC) when the region of Iran was seemingly unoccupied. This picture gradually changed when archaeological research was resumed in the late 1980s, but it was sporadic and was exclusively conducted by Iranian archaeologists. In 1996, another lowland aceramic early Neolithic site (Chogha Bonut; Alizadeh 2003) was excavated in lowland Susiana, south-western Iran, that closely reflected the results obtained at Ali Kosh. Further systematic research into early Neolithic Iran, by both national and international expeditions, had to wait until Hassan Fazeli Nashli, a prehistorian from the
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Scientific and interdisciplinary research on the early stages of domestication and sedentism in Iran was pioneered by Robert J. Braidwood and his team in Iranian Kurdistan during the late 1950s (Braidwood 1960; Braidwood et al. 1961). This project was followed by research on the three important early Neolithic sites of Guran (Meldegaard et al. 1963; Mortensen 1972), Ganj Darreh (Smith 1976) and Abdul Hosein (Pullard 1990), all in the same region of the Central Zagros. During the 1960s, Frank Hole and Kent Flannery, two younger members of the Braidwood Iranian Prehistoric Project of the Oriental Institute, concentrated their attention on the lowland plain of Deh Luran, south-western Iran, seeking evidence for the expansion of early sedentism to the lower altitudes with promising results obtained from the aceramic and early ceramic site of Ali Kosh (Hole et al. 1969).
Review University of Tehran, was put in charge of the Iranian Centre for Archaeological Research (ICAR) between 2005 and 2009. Much of the research that appears in both of the books under review here was conducted under his administration, and by a new generation of Iranian archaeologists who, in the early 2000s, turned their attention to the neglected early Neolithic period.
cohesion (Pollock & Bernbeck 2010: 276, 285–86). In Chapter 11 of The earliest Neolithic, Cole et al. address this question and suggest that many of the potential ritual trappings and symbolic paraphernalia may have been made of perishable materials— feathers, leather, face and body painting, tattoos and wooden objects—which would not survive. As a result, they wisely postpone any solution for the ‘why’ question until more data can be systematically collected and studied.
The earliest Neolithic of Iran, edited by Matthews, Matthews & Mohammadifar, reports on the excavation of two Pre-pottery Neolithic sites in the Central Zagros region. The second book, The neolithisation of Iran, edited by Matthews & Fazeli Nashli, is a collection of papers delivered at a oneday workshop at the Seventh International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (7ICAANE) in 2010. As well as the workshop papers, it also includes a number of other contributions solicited by the editors. These two publications are therefore intimately related and share a number of themes.
Both books—especially the second—also serve admirably to contextualise the ideas, models and insights of scholars who, reliant on older excavation data, have suggested not a monolithic view of the processes that led to domestication and sedentism, but a series of parallel and varied cultural trajectories independent of outside influence from the formative zones in south-west Asia (e.g. Whittle 1996; Kozłowski 1999; Zeder 1999, 2005; Zeder & Smith 2009).
There are four major questions about the evolution of the early Neolithic period: where, when, why and how? The first two are well known and subject to little controversy. The loci were the high steppes and inter-mountain valleys of the Zagros and Taurus chains, as well as the southern Levant, from 10 000 to 7000 BC. The third question was first asked by Robert J. Braidwood: why did domestication and sedentism take place when it did and not earlier? No one has proposed a satisfactory answer to this fundamental question, although a recent focus on cognitive archaeology and the role that symbolic behaviour and rituals played in the transition from a mobile hunting-gathering life to domestication and the emergence of sedentism has made some progress in throwing off the shackles of the environmental deterministic approaches that still dominate the field (the literature on this debate is large and complex; see Watkins 2011 for a summary).
If these two books share many themes, their organisation and formats are different. The earliest Neolithic of Iran is an extensive and detailed report on excavations at two aceramic early Neolithic sites: Sheikhi Abad (spelled Sheikh-e Abad in the book) and Jani in the Central Zagros region. These excavations were conducted by the University of Reading’s Central Zagros Archaeological Project (CZAP) and the Iranian Cultural Heritage, Handicraft and Tourism Organization (ICHHTO). The book is organised into 20 chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 contain a lucid review of the history and current state of research on early Neolithic societies, as well as important aspects of the geography, palaeoenvironment and palaeoclimate of the Central Zagros region. These two chapters set the stage for the results of the excavations and surveys. Chapter 3 is a report of a survey of caves and rockshelters in the vicinity of Sheikhi Abad. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to the results of the excavations at Sheikhi Abad and Jani respectively. Three trenches were excavated at Sheikhi Abad, of which only Trench 3 produced architecture. Two separate buildings were found here, one with multiple small rooms and the other a single rectangular room with a Tshaped interior. The north-east end of this room was furnished with five sheep and goat skulls (pp. 43–44). Unlike the multi-room Building 1 that was made of pis´e, the walls of Building 2 were made of mud bricks, but no dimensions are provided, nor any illustrations of the articulated bricks. The two buildings may be contemporary, but no elevations of the floor, base of
The editors of these two books are well aware of the need to focus on rituals and symbolism but, as they observe, there is little tangible evidence—in the Central Zagros region at least—to provide a foundation on which further analysis and interpretation can be built. As at most early (and, indeed, later) Neolithic sites, there is a dearth of small finds and exotic materials. This characteristic is sometimes interpreted by an outlandish and ideologically driven notion that this rarity is the result of a deliberate societal decision to avoid marks of social distinction, which could be a threat to social C
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future research on this fundamental era of cultural evolution.
At Jani (c. 8160–7950 cal BC), work was limited to cleaning a 60m section exposed by the action of the river and removal of soil by the locals. Traces of architecture and successive floors were discovered. Unfortunately there is no contour map of the site, nor any line drawing of the section; the published photographic images are also of low resolution (a CD of colour photographs accompanies the book, but they cannot substitute for line drawings). The fact that the two sites, some 90km apart, were excavated for only 6 weeks may account for the limited stratigraphic information and architectural details. The book, however, is rich in chemical and physical laboratory analyses, to which the remaining chapters are devoted.
ALIZADEH, A. 2003. Excavations at the prehistoric mound of Chogha Bonut, Khuzestan, Iran. Seasons 1976/77, 1977/78, and 1996 (Oriental Institute Publications 120). Chicago (IL): Oriental Institute. BRAIDWOOD, R.J. 1960. Seeking the world’s first farmers in Persian Kurdistan. The Illustrated London News 237: 695–97. BRAIDWOOD, R.J., B. HOWE & C.A. REED. 1961. The Iranian Prehistoric Project. Science 133: 2008–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.133.3469.2008 HOLE, F. 1998. The spread of agriculture to the eastern arc of the Fertile Crescent: food for the herders, in A.B. Damania (ed.) The origins of agriculture and crop domestication: proceedings of the Harlan Symposium, 10–14 May 1997, Aleppo, Syria: 83–89. Aleppo: International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas. HOLE, F., K.V. FLANNERY & J.A. NEELY. 1969. Prehistory and human ecology of the Deh Luran Plain: an early village sequence from Khuzestan, Iran (Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology 1). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. KOZŁOWSKI, S.K. 1999. The eastern wing of the Fertile Crescent: late prehistory of Greater Mesopotamian lithic industries (British Archaeological Reports international series 760). Oxford: British Archaeological Reports. MELDEGAARD, J., P. MORTENSEN & H. THRANE. 1963. Excavations at Tepe Guran, Luristan: preliminary report of the Danish archaeological expedition to Iran 1963. Acta Archaeologica 34: 97–133. MORTENSEN, P. 1972. Seasonal camps and early villages in the Zagros, in P.J. Ucko, R. Tringham & G.W. Dimbleby (ed.) Man, settlement and urbanism: 293–98. London: Duckworth. ¨ ZDOG˘ AN, M. 2005. The expansion of the Neolithic O way of life: what we know and what we do not know, in C. Lichter (ed.) How did farming reach Europe? Anatolian-European relations from the second half of the 7th through the first half of the 6th millennium cal BC: 13–27. Istanbul: Ege Yayinlari. POLLOCK, S. & R. BERNBECK. 2010. Neolithic world at Tol-e Bashi, in S. Pollock, R. Bernbeck & K. Abdi (ed.) The 2003 excavations at Tol-e Basi, Iran. Social life in a Neolithic village (Arch¨aologie in Iran und Turan 10): 274–87. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern. PULLARD, J. 1990. Tepe Abdul Hosein: a Neolithic site in western Iran (British Archaeological Reports international series 563). Oxford: British Archaeological Reports.
In The neolithisation of Iran, the editors, inspired ¨ by Ozdo˘ gan’s (2005) model of the spread of early Neolithic life-ways, divide Iran into seven zones: the Central Zagros; the North Zagros and Azerbaijan; the South Zagros and Khuzestan (the Susiana plain); Fars and South Iran; the Central Plateau; North-east Iran; and South-east Iran (p. 7). Of these zones, only the Central Zagros is considered “formative”, defined as the locus of the earliest evidence of domestication and sedentism without obvious external influence of any significance; others are considered as “learning zones” (p. 3), i.e. regions that were influenced from the “formative zone”. While the results of the various excavations and surveys presented in the 18 chapters do provide evidence for the mosaic model of ‘becoming Neolithic’ through different trajectories, one must bear in mind that the excavations were conducted with different methods and procedures; in fact most of the reports, unlike those in the first book, lack description of the retrieval procedures. Because of this problem, quantitative analysis of the data in The neolithisation of Iran should be viewed with caution. It is unfortunate that the CZAP, like many other joint projects in Iran, was abruptly terminated by the ICHHTO. The uncertainty that archaeologists working in Iran face is a major factor that forces them to work as if there is no tomorrow. This situation is indeed responsible for inconclusive results, especially for projects on sensitive and delicate archaeological remains at early Neolithic sites. Nevertheless, despite the inevitable shortcomings, these two books are steps in the direction of a major re-evaluation of Iran’s early Neolithic and a major incentive for
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References
Review SMITH, P.E.L. 1976. Reflections on four seasons of excavations at Tappeh Ganj Dareh, in F. Bagherzadeh (ed.) Proceedings of the IVth Annual Symposium on Archaeological Research in Iran: 11–22. Tehran: Iranian Center for Archaeological Research. WATKINS, T. 2011. Opening the door, pointing the way. Pal´eorient 37(1): 29–38. WHITTLE, A. 1996. Europe in the Neolithic: the creation of new worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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ZEDER, M.A.1999. Animal domestication in the Zagros: a review of past and current research. Pal´eorient 25(2): 11–25. – 2005. New perspectives on livestock domestication in the Fertile Crescent as viewed from the Zagros Mountains, in J.-D. Vigne, J. Peters & D. Helmer (ed.) The first steps of animal domestication: new archaeozoological approaches: 125–46. Oxford: Oxbow. ZEDER, M.A. & B.D. SMITH. 2009. A conversation on agricultural origins: talking past each other in a crowded room. Current Anthropology 50: 681–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/605553
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