An Emerging Picture of the Neolithic of Northeast Iran
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IranicaAntiqua, vol. LI, 2016 doi: 10.2143/IA.51.0.3117827 AN EMERGING PICTURE OF THE NEOLITHIC OF NORTHEAST IRAN BY Kourosh ROUSTAEI (Iranian Center for Archaeological Research) Abstract: For many years the Neolithic of the northeastern Iranian Plateau was acknowledged by materials and data recovered from the three sites of Yarim Tappeh, Turang Tappeh and Sang-e Chakhmaq, all excavated in the 1960-1970s. In the last two decades an increasing mass of information based on archaeologi- cal fieldworks and reappraisal of archival materials have been built up that is going to significantly enhance our understanding on the Neolithic period of the region. The overwhelming majority of the information is obtained from the Shahroud area and the Gorgan plain, on the south and north of the Eastern Alborz Mountains respectively. So far, sixty two Neolithic sites have been identified in the region. This paper briefly reviews the known Neolithic sites and outlines the various implications of the newly emerging picture of the period for the northeast region of Iran. Keywords: Neolithic, northeast region, Sang-e Chakhmaq, Shahroud, Gorgan plain, Jeitun Culture Introduction Since Robert Braidwood’s pioneering investigations in the Zagros Mountains in 1960s (1961), western Iran has been the interest area for scholars who searching the early evidence of domestications. The follow- ing decades witnessed a series of well-planned works (e.g. Hole et al. 1969) in the region that considerably contributed to our understanding on early stages of the village life. Renewal of the relevant investigations in the Zagros region in recent years points the significance of the region on the incipient agriculture in the Near East (e.g. Riehl et al. 2013; Matthews etal. 2013). By contrast, the eastern part of the Iranian plateau has so far only experienced sporadic archaeological investigations. Indeed, by east- ward moving from Zagros the evidence for early Neolithic life become increasingly meagre (cf. Hole 1999). 22 K. ROUSTAEI On the northeastern fringe of Iranian Plateau, in southern Turkmenistan, where considered by some archaeologists as “the northeastern frontier of the ancient Near East” (Tosi 1973-74), a multiple program of surveys and excavations was undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s by Soviet archaeolo- gists which led to the identification of a series of Neolithic sites repre- sented under the term “Jeitun Culture” after the extensively excavated type-site of Jeitun (Masson & Sarianidi 1972). The people of this culture practiced wheat and barley agriculture and sheep and goat rising. They had mud-brick buildings and used a blade-dominated chipped stone industry. Recent works on this culture (Harris 2010) suggest that when the people of Jeitun settled the Kopet Dagh piedmonts around 6000 BC they were already full-equipped with cereal agriculture and stockbreeding. Despite extensive excavations at several Jeitun period sites in southern Turkmeni- stan no convincing traces of earlier stage of the Neolithic way of life are obtained, making some scholars propose the area was settled by immi- grant, agro-pastoral groups who, presumably stimulated by 8.2 k climatic event, seeking “new, less risk-prone areas to cultivate” (Harris 2010: 235). In 1960s-1970s, when the Russian archaeologists were working metic- ulously on the Jeitun culture sites in the Kopet Dagh foothills, evidence of Neolithic period was occurred at few sites in northeastern Iran: Yarim Tappeh, Turang Tappeh and Sang-e Chakhmaq, all considered to be related to Jeitun culture (e.g. Stronach 1972; Deshayes 1967; Masuda 1976). While recovered materials from the first two sites were essentially potsherds, extensive excavations of the Japanese team at Sang-e Chakhmaq produced substantial amounts of finds and data, but the importance of the site for tracing back the possible antecedent of Jeitun culture in a regional scale was largely disregarded due to insufficient publications (e.g. Masuda 1973, 1974, 1976). In fact, until the last decade major published informa- tion on the Neolithic of the northeast Iran (fig. 1) came from these three sites. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979 all foreign fieldworks in Iran came to a halt; this hiatus lasted for more than two decades. Consequently, and due to the subsequent reorganization in the structure of the Iranian archaeological apparatus, the rate of archaeological investigations in the country decreased substantially for at least a decade. By resuming the archaeological fieldworks on the prehistory of northeastern region in late 1980s, an increasing amount of information came to light which remained largely unpublished or briefly published only in Persian. By summarizing AN EMERGING PICTURE OF THE NEOLITHIC OF NORTHEAST IRAN 23 available archaeological data, both published and unpublished, the aim of this paper is to presents and assesses a newly emerging picture, though still incomplete, of the Neolithic of northeastern Iran emphasizing its close ties with the “Jeitun Culture” of southern Turkmenistan. We are not going to discuss in detail the Neolithic culture of the region, but will outline the available information on the subject to start rethinking about various aspects of the first sedentary culture in the region which flourished in the late 7th to the 6th millennia BC in this part of the Iranian Plateau.1 Spatial and Temporal Contexts Due to its complicated geography, Iranian Plateau exhibits diverse land- scapes. In this mosaic of different ecological niches ancient cultural trends have had their own identities, as manifested in their material corpora. Acknowledging the difference evident in the material culture of various parts of the Iranian Plateau, archaeologists usually divide the territory into different regions, each characterizes roughly by its own archaeological assemblages and chronologies (e.g. Voigt & Dyson 1992: 122). In this study we deal with “the northeast region” of the Iranian Plateau which encompasses, in general, the Golestan Province (including the Gorgan Plain), Khorasan-e Shomali (Northern Khorasan) Province, northern half of Khorasan-e Razavi Province, and the eastern half of the Semnan Prov- ince (fig. 1). While this terrain is considered as a distinct cultural zone by archaeologists, there are still some differences between the cultural materi- als of its various segments (cf. Kohl etal. 1982). In discussing the chronologies of the northeastern Iran, Voigt and Dyson (1992) divided the northeastern region into two main zones of “the Damghan/Khorasan Sequence” and “the Mazandaran/Gurgan Sequence”. They proposed sequential periods for these two sequences based on avail- able excavated materials at that time (Table 1). Here, we do not intend to criticize the proposed cultural sequence, but rather to provide some com- ments as to which corresponding periods in the sequence we refer to as Neolithic in the northeastern region. The Neolithic period of the region is best represented by the materials excavated from the twin mounds of Sang-e Chakhmaq in the Shahroud 1 In this paper the term “Iranian Plateau” is used to include Kopet Dagh Mountains, as its natural northeastern limit. 24 K. ROUSTAEI Fig. 1. Map of Iran; the northeast region is shown in gray. area (e.g. Masuda etal. 2013; Tsuneki 2014a; Roustaei 2009a; Roustaei et al. 2015). The west mound is almost an aceramic Neolithic site with mud brick architecture, an essentially blade-dominated chipped stone industry and various types of clay, bone and stone artifacts (see Masuda 1973, 1974, 1976). Its economy included cereal cultivation and herding of sheep and goats and, to a lesser extent, hunting (Mashkour etal. 2014; Tengberg 2014); several AMS dating suggest a time span of c. 7100-6700 BC for the site (Nakamura 2014; Roustaei etal. 2015). The east mound is a ceramic Neolithic occupation with mud brick architecture, a hand-made, chaff- tempered, mainly painted ceramic tradition, and a wealth of various small objects made from different types of materials, including clay, ala- baster, shell, wood and copper. The east mound inhabitants practiced mainly wheat and barley agriculture, sheep and goat herding and some AN EMERGING PICTURE OF THE NEOLITHIC OF NORTHEAST IRAN 25 Table 1. Earlier part of the cultural sequence proposed by Voigt & Dyson (1992: 169-172, Fig. 2) for northeastern Iran. Damghan/Khorasan Sequence Represented by A. TheSang-eChakhmaqperiod levels V-I in the West Tepe at Sang-e Chakhmaq B. TheDjeitunperiod lower strata at Sang-e Chakhmaq East, levels VI-III C. TheCheshmehAliperiod levels II-I at the top of the East Mound at Sang-e Chakhmaq Mazandaran/Gurgan Sequence A. TheAceramicNeolithicperiod materials from Hotu Cave labeled “Sub-Neolithic” and Belt Cave levels 10-8 B. TheSoftwareNeolithicperiod upper Belt Cave, levels 7-4, and by Hotu -8 to -6.2 m C. TheDjeitunperiod the lowest strata at Yarim Tepe, or the Yarim “Early Chalcolithic” D. TheCheshmehAliperiod Hotu Cave Trench B, the 560 and 580 cm strata hunting (Mashkour etal. 2014; Tengberg 2014). AMS dating suggests that the site was occupied from c. 6200 to 5300 BC (Nakamura 2014; Roustaei etal. 2015). As some researchers already observed (e.g. Kohl etal. 1982; Kohl 1984; Harris 2010), certain aspects of the culture represented at the east mound of Sang-e Chakhmaq have close ties with those of the so-called Jeitun culture in southern Turkmenistan. While in some aspects, like pottery assemblage, there are striking similarities between the earlier phase of Sang-e Chakhmaq east mound and Jeitun,2 they differ significantly in other aspects, like archi- tecture. It is most likely that these cultures evolved from a common stem but diverged gradually through time. For the time being we put aside the detailed comparisons between different aspects of these cultures, because it make us far afield of our purpose here, which is an overview of recently acknowl- edged wealth of the Neolithic of northeast region. Therefore, while we are well aware of resemblances and differences between these cultures (e.g.