The Neolithisation of Iran

By Oxbow Books

The period c. 10,000-5000 BC witnessed fundamental changes in the human condition with societies across the Fertile Crescent shifting their alignment from millennia-old practices of seasonally mobile hunting and foraging to year-round sedentism, plant cultivation and animal herding. The significant role of Iran in the early stages of this transition was recognised more than half a century ago but has not been to the fore of academic consciousness in recent decades. In the meantime, investigations into Neolithic transformation have proceeded apace in all other regions of the Fertile Crescent and beyond. Here, 18 studies attempt to redress that balance in re-assessing the role of Iran in the early neolithisation of human societies.

These studies, many of them by Iranian scholars, consider patterns of change and/or continuity across a variety of topographical landscapes; investigate Neolithic settlement patterns, the use of caves, animal exploitation and environmental indicators and present new insights into some well-known and some newly investigated sites. The results re-affirm the formative role of this region in the transition to sedentary farming.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Dec 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781782971917

Book preview

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THE NEOLITHISATION OF IRAN: PATTERNS OF CHANGE AND CONTINUITY

Hassan Fazeli Nashli and Roger Matthews

The significance of Iran in the Neolithic

The importance of the Neolithic period in the meta-narrative of human history cannot be overstated. Its enduring significance is underlined by the output of books and articles devoted to its study on a global scale, an output that shows no sign of faltering (recent global overviews include Mithen 2003; Bellwood 2005; Barker 2006). For over a century now the topic of the transition from hunter-forager to villager-herder lifestyles has been to the forefront of archaeological and anthropological investigation. At the start of the twentieth century, arguably the first ever multi-disciplinary archaeological investigation was led by the geologist Raphael Pumpelly in order to investigate agricultural origins, amongst other issues, at the site of Anau in Turkmenistan (Pumpelly 1908), immediately north of eastern Iran, with recovery and study of animal and plant remains in a systematic and stratigraphically informed way. Pumpelly’s pioneering work, and his conviction that every shovelful contained a story, if it could be interpreted (Pumpelly 1918, 793), was fundamental in influencing Gordon Childe’s idea of the ‘Neolithic Revolution’, as Childe termed it, especially concerning his oasis hypothesis with its stress on environmental change as a critical factor in driving developments in human society (Childe 1936).

The notion of a Neolithic Revolution, with its implication of sudden and dramatic change, has receded in popularity in recent decades, with the realisation that the suite of developments that characterises this episode in human history took place over long time-spans and in ways that appear to be locally specific and historically contingent (Zeder 2006). Rather than searching for a grand overarching theory of change in order to explain the Neolithic transition, the emphasis has moved to frameworks of explanation that pay close and careful attention to existing relevant archaeological information, that are scaled at the regional level, and that focus on the complex interplay of a range of different environmental and social preconditions, prompts, and factors of various kinds, to quote two of the most innovative researchers in this field (Zeder and Smith 2009, 681). The Neolithic period of many regions of the world is now being studied in this spirit, with successful situation of global issues within local contexts (Barker 2006; Conolly et al. 2011; Hadjikoumis et al. 2011). Across Southwest Asia, such approaches have been productively applied to the Neolithic of selected regions, including the southern and central Levant (Bar-Yosef 2001), the Euphrates region of north Syria (Moore et al. 2000), all parts of Anatolia (Özdoğan and Başgelen 2007), Cyprus (Peltenburg and Wasse 2004), and the northern Zagros and foothills region of eastern Iraq (Kozlowski 1999).

One region of Southwest Asia that has yet to realise its full potential in terms of the study of its Neolithic past is the land of Iran. Many authors have commented on the relative lack of archaeological evidence from Iran relating to the Neolithic period, compared to other regions of Southwest Asia such as the Levant or Anatolia (Hole 1987a, 27; 1996, 263; 1998, 83; Solecki et al. 2004, 119; Barker 2006, 146). During the 1950s-70s major archaeological projects in Iran led the way in the study of the Neolithic of Southwest Asia. Following Braidwood’s pioneering excavations at Jarmo in the Iraqi Zagros and at Asiab and Sarab, near Kermanshah (Braidwood 1960; 1961; Braidwood et al. 1983), archaeologists subsequently investigated Neolithic issues in the 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 at Ali Kosh (Hole et al. 1969), Chogha Sefid (Hole 1977) and Chogha Bonut (Alizadeh 2003). To the north, in Iranian Azerbaijan, the site of Hajji Firuz (Voigt 1983) augmented the picture of Neolithic societies in western Iran. Much of the material from these pioneering projects has been productively reworked and studied by scholars in the years following the cessation of prehistoric fieldwork in Iran in 1979, with valuable syntheses and analyses in the fields of chronology (Voigt and Dyson 1992; Hole 1987b) archaeobotany (Miller 2003; Charles 2008), archaeozoology (Hesse 1984; Hole 1996; Zeder 1999; 2006; Zeder and Hesse 2000), lithics (Kozlowski 1999), figurines (Voigt 2000; Daems 2004) and other aspects of material and social life (Kozlowski and Aurenche 2005).

From 1979 field research into the prehistory of Iran was put on hold for a quarter of a century, to be slowly restarted in recent years (Abdi 2001). It was during this period, approximately 1980–2005, that the ongoing development of modern scientific techniques, and especially the means of applying them at reasonable cost in the field and in the laboratory, transformed archaeology into a truly modern academic discipline. In concert with these developments, which shaped archaeology globally (Trigger 1989), the same period witnessed an increasing sophistication in the articulation and application of theories of social structure and social change that brought archaeology in line with the theoretical maturity of other disciplines within the social sciences (Hodder 1999). The application of a scientific and theoretically informed archaeology to the Neolithic of Iran, then, represents both a major challenge and a unique opportunity. We hope that this book demonstrates that significant steps are being taken along that path.

What has never been in doubt, at least to most scholars, is the significance of Iran within the Neolithic transition. Recent and ongoing research now indicates that, in parallel with Late Pleistocene–Early Holocene developments in the Levant, the Zagros-Taurus arc of high steppe, foothills, and mountain plains spanning the modern zones of west Iran, east and northeast Iraq, and southeast Turkey, should be regarded as a related but distinct centre, or cluster of centres, of Early Neolithic development in Southwest Asia with no evidence for significant external influence (Solecki et al. 2004). Of critical significance here is the occurrence within Early Holocene Iran of the wild ancestors of so many later domesticated species, including goat, sheep, pigs and cattle, as well as wild cereals and pulses, coupled with adequate rainfall distribution and plains with arable soils to enable and attract agriculture without irrigation (Clutton-Brock 1999; Zohary and Hopf 2000).

This broad region of the eastern Fertile Crescent is as critical as the contemporary southern Levant to the development of farming, stock-keeping, sedentary communities. Meta-narratives containing maps of Southwest Asia with arrows indicating the spread of Neolithic ideas and practices from a Levantine core outwards (Bar-Yosef 2001, fig. 4) tell only a part of the story. It is questionable, at least, to claim that Most scholars agree that there is sufficient evidence of fully-fledged farming communities existing during the PPNB along the ‘Levantine Corridor’ that expanded during the ninth millennium BP into Anatolia and the Zagros, and to suggest that goat and sheep were domesticated only when farmers moved into Anatolia and the Zagros mountains (Bar-Yosef 1998, 196). The archaeological and DNA evidence (Luikart et al. 2001; Naderi et al. 2008; Pereira and Amorim 2010) suggests that goat and sheep were domesticated by the indigenous inhabitants of the Taurus-Zagros arc, and that skills and knowledge in stock-keeping, as well as the animals themselves, moved out from there across Southwest Asia and beyond. There is also evidence of extremely early barley domestication in the Zagros or further east in Iran, independently of its domestication in the Levant (Morrell and Clegg 2007; Saisho and Purugganan 2007). Similarly, our appreciation of the significance of Iran beyond the Zagros, that is in regions to the east and northeast, is steadily increasing as recent and ongoing projects start to make and publish their discoveries, and we hope that this book will play its part in that process too.

A series of becomings: the meaning of neolithisation

We should begin by considering what we understand by the term ‘neolithisation’, a word that has spread widely in usage over the past 20 years or so. Broadly speaking, the term is used by prehistorians to define an episode in time, varying from place to place, during which human communities of any given region make an initial transition from hunter-forager to villager-herder. The phase of neolithisation is understood as heralding the Neolithic period itself. It is the process by which communities become Neolithic. We can then rephrase the question as what did it mean for communities to become Neolithic? Multiple approaches to this question have been made in the century or so since it was formulated. The most basic view sees neolithisation as the process of introduction and development of domestic animals and plants (Robinson et al. 2011, 1). In his masterful survey of Neolithic Europe, Whittle (1996) summarises and critiques archaeological approaches to defining the Neolithic transition, which he groups under the headings of chronology, technology, culture, subsistence and sedentism, demography, social structure, and belief, concluding by stressing that Becoming Neolithic may have been much more a spiritual conversion than a matter of changing diets (Whittle 1996, 8), which chimes nicely with Sherratt’s view (1995, 21) that the coming of the Neolithic was never as boring as just the invention of porridge. This is a useful starting point and encourages an emphasis on flexibility and openness in approaching this complex episode in the human story. A similar approach has been taken in a stimulating review of Neolithic developments in Fars in southwest Iran, where neolithisation is seen as above all a social process (Pollock et al. 2010, 7). In her review of the transition to agriculture in southeast Europe, Tringham (2000, 22) also encourages a flexible understanding of the term neolithisation, arguing that it means something different in different parts of the world and in different parts of Europe, while Vander Linden (2011, 41) has recently articulated the neolithisation of Europe as a fragmented AND a coherent process, endlessly oscillating between the global and the local. An advantage in de-stressing the economic and subsistence components of the Neolithic transition is that it allows us to include within our purview those communities of Southwest Asia who were clearly still hunter-foragers, in purely subsistence terms, but who at the same time were already developing a sense of community and attachment to locale, and to available resources, that enabled the earliest stages of sedentism and all that followed on from it.

Within the context of European prehistory there has been much debate about processes of neolithisation (Whittle 1996; Price 2000; Lichter 2005; Hadjikoumis et al. 2011), centring on the issue of diffusion as against indigenous development. The diffusion side of this debate can in turn be divided into cultural diffusion versus demic diffusion (Bellwood 2005). While the implications of the European Neolithic debate bear general significance for the study of neolithisation in Southwest Asia, there is one major difference to be taken into account in approaching the neolithisation of Southwest Asia as against that of Europe. Because of the historical significance of Southwest Asia as a place where many of the components of becoming Neolithic were worked out in a pristine sense by human communities, a ‘formative zone’ as it has been called (Özdoğan 2005), we can argue that the process of neolithisation here has two broad levels of meaning. Firstly, a community becomes Neolithic by working out for itself, with or without a clear sense of purpose, how to manage herds of goat, how to cultivate plots of barley, how to live together seasonally and, increasingly, year-round in the same place, and how to articulate a persistent, valid scheme of the ways in which human society is situated in the world around, a cosmology or system of belief. Potential pathways along this broad route are multiple and complex, and they form the topic of much current research into the Neolithic across Southwest Asia.

Secondly, a community or group of communities can become Neolithic not by working the steps out for themselves but by learning them, willingly or under duress, from others who have already done so, in which case the key question becomes what was the process of learning to become Neolithic in this specific case?, and again there are multiple potential answers contingent upon place and time. But here also there will not need to be a comprehensive acceptance or adoption of Neolithic attributes by a community learning to become Neolithic. Each society will adapt and adopt in its own particular way, dependent upon a range of internal and external factors. In any case, whether we are considering societies in the formative zone or in what we might term the ‘learning zone’, the emphasis is on becoming Neolithic rather than on being Neolithic in a static sense. In Whittle’s words (1996, 9), There was no uniform process, no single history. The Neolithic period is a series of becomings, rather than the spread of something already formed.

The importance of distinguishing between the processes of pristine domestication and the mechanisms whereby agriculture is adopted, as outlined above, lies at the heart of Rindos’ (1984) ambitious study of agricultural origins, and forms the basis of a recent study by Barrett (2011) that takes an ecological perspective on neolithisation in Europe. In this light Barrett (2011, 67) characterises agriculture as a process of energy management, the development of which was inherent in the evolution of post-glacial forager ecologies whose transformation was both facilitated by, and facilitated, the transmission of cultigens and domesticates. The key role for plant and animal domesticates in this scenario, which is seen as having its roots in the Younger Dryas as regards the European case, was as systems of secondary storage (Barrett 2011, 67) within changing human views of landscape and land management, with increasingly developed senses of association of community identities with specific places and their food and other resources. These components of social and economic development are intertwined through the articulation and refinement of community ideologies that tie social identities to histories of land and landscapes (Barrett 2011, 85).

In approaching the neolithisation of Iran in particular, we are well situated to keep in mind Rindos’ and Barrett’s distinction between processes of domestication and processes of adoption of agriculture, and this will be a major recurrent theme of the chapters that follow. In addition to these significant developments, Watkins has stressed the role of external symbolic storage, manifest in increasing evidence for widespread use of symbols and modes of artistic and cultic expression, in enabling the creation and sustaining of wide-ranging networks of cultural, social and economic interaction (Watkins 2006, 85). Bernbeck (2004, 146), however, rather bleakly suggests that an apparent lack of evidence for a symbolic-ideological frame within the Iranian Neolithic may frustrate any attempt to understand the social meaning of neolithisation in the eastern Fertile Crescent.

In considering the proliferation of Neolithic lifestyles, there are numerous ways in which forager-farmer transitions might be affected or adopted, all of which can usefully be incorporated within the term neolithisation. Diffusionist approaches see change as happening due to the spread of ideas, products and practices or to the spread of farming communities themselves across the landscape. Recent studies on ancient DNA from human skeletons in Neolithic Europe suggest that the spread of the farming lifestyle into Europe was affected above all by movements of people from Anatolia and other parts of Southwest Asia along the courses of the Danube and Dniester rivers, with little evidence for adoption of farming by pre-existing European hunter-foragers (Haak et al. 2010). Indigenous models, by contrast, lay stress on autochthonous development without significant movement of populations, whereby local communities learn to become Neolithic through their own experimentation or through the acquisition of knowledge of new technologies and practices via regional networks of interaction and acculturation involving other communities near and far. Material culture continuities, in the face of evidence for changing subsistence practices, for example, might be argued to support models of indigenous development (Lichter 2005). Where detailed studies of the movement of Neolithic modes of living have been conducted, for example in Özdoğan’s consideration of the expansion of the Neolithic into Western Anatolia and beyond, it is clear that the picture is complex and non-linear, involving different modes, such as migration, infiltration, acculturation etc., all taking place simultaneously (Özdoğan 2005, 26).

In this context it would be appropriate to consider what we understand by the term ‘Neolithic’ (Özdoğan 2005; Price 2000; Tringham 2000). During the later twentieth century, the emphasis shifted from a technological definition of this term, largely related to stone tool technologies, to an economic definition with emphasis on the use of domesticated plants and animals within a farming lifestyle. As discussed above, more recently the trend has been to reduce the emphasis on subsistence practices as a criterion in defining Neolithic communities, as the evidence increasingly indicates both long-term persistence of hunter-forager communities into ‘Neolithic’ times, as well as use of highly mixed subsistence strategies, criss-crossing the hunter-farmer divide, within settled communities in the Neolithic. A specific set of subsistence practices cannot therefore be used as a defining characteristic of Neolithic communities. One solution lies in accepting the evidence for diversity of practices and social attributes that are manifest in the millennia from c.10,000 BC as in itself a defining characteristic of what it means to be, or to be eternally becoming, Neolithic.

At the same time we can underline the evidence for networks of interaction and connection that characterise human society at this time, with massively increased capacities for sharing knowledge of practices, behaviours, and technologies that are richly attested in the archaeological record across vast regions of Southwest Asia in the Neolithic, especially its later stages. Such evidence comes in the form of widely traded materials, obsidian above all, and shared ways of constructing and living in buildings, in the layout of settlements, in the use of human and animal figurines, and in cultic and sacred practices including burial of the dead. It is clear that Neolithic communities were communicating with one another through local and regional networks on a scale difficult to imagine today, indeed scarcely matched in later prehistoric or historic periods. It has reasonably been proposed that such scales of interaction and sharing of knowledge can only have taken place in a context of widespread peace and prosperity rather than through conflict and competition (Özdoğan 2005, 19). Furthermore, it is important that we keep in mind components and aspects of societies that do not appear to have been shared or transmitted from region to region, as this absence of connection can in itself be illuminating, as Perlès (2005) has demonstrated for the spread of the Neolithic into Greece as contrasted to its spread into the Balkans.

Key to sites:

1    Maghzaliyeh

2    Qermez Dere

3    Nemrik

4    Umm Dabaghiyah

5    M’lefaat

6    Gird Chai

7    Shanidar

Zawi Chemi Shanidar

8    Shimshara

9    Zarzi

10  Palegawra

11  Karim Shahir

Jarmo

12  Bestansur

13  Hajji Firuz

14  Yanik Tepe

15  Rihan III

16  Tamerkhan

17  Chogha Golan

18  Fasil

Kholaman

19  Sarab-e Yavari

20  Jani

21  Asiab

Sarab

22  Chia Chakhmagho

23  Guran

24  East Chia Sabz

25  Sheikh-e Abad

26  Ganj Dareh

27  Abdul Hosein

28  Ali Kosh

Chogha Sefìd

29  Tula’i

30  Boneh Fazili

Chogha Bonut

Chogha Mish

31  Tepe Khaleseh

32  Chahar Boneh

33  Ebrahimabad

34  Rashak III

35  Cheshmeh Ali

36  Tepe Pardis

37  Tepe Sialk

38  Tol-e Nurabad

39  Tol-e Baši

40  Tal-e Muški

41  Tal-e Jari

42  Tal-e Bakun

43  Rahmatabad

44  Arsanjan

Tang-e Bolaghi

45  Komishan

46  Belt/Kamarband

47  Hotu

48  Tureng Tepe

49  Pookerdvall

50  Sang-e-Chakhmaq

51  Yarim Tepe

52  Aqe Tepe

53  Tepe Pahlavan

54  Jeitun

55  Anau

56  Tal-i Iblis

57  Tepe Yahya

58  Tell-e Atashi

Fig. 1.1: Map of Neolithic sites in Iran and adjacent regions

In his analysis of late prehistoric communities of the eastern Fertile Crescent, Kozlowski (1999, 151) employs the term ‘Neolithic’ with considerable caution, reserving it, at least in theory, for truly agricultural societies, which he sees as first appearing in Southwest Asia in the late ninth millennium BC (Kozlowski and Aurenche 2005, 84). In their review of the evidence for the spread of agriculture into eastern Europe, Zvelebil and Lillie (2000, 59) similarly insist on defining the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic as denoting a shift from a native system of hunting, gathering, and managing of possibly husbanded but biologically undomesticated resources, to a new, agro-pastoral system based on a more productive husbandry of imported domesticates and cultigens. The problem with this usage is that there is often difficulty in determining the degree to which any given community has made a full or partial switch to agriculture. There is also much evidence for continuity of hunter-foraging components and communities living alongside those who have made an overall switch to the farming life. The boundaries between wild and domesticated, between foraging and farming, start to dissolve when we examine them more closely (Terrell et al. 2003). Furthermore, the processes of change from hunter-forager to villager-farmer can be extremely drawn-out, lasting centuries at least in some cases, and it can be impossible to determine when on that timeline of change the transition has occurred. When we consider the Central Zagros region in the centuries from c.10,000 to 7000 BC, for example, much of the material culture of sites such as Sheikh-e Abad and Asiab (this volume, Chapter Two) is characteristic of hunter-forager societies, but other evidence, for example of animal penning, suggests that these communities were intensively exploiting wild goat, and probably sheep and cereals too, in ways that go beyond purely hunter-forager strategies.

The danger in adopting a flexible use of the term neolithisation is that it loses its specificity. In some respects a flexible definition is applicable as much to Upper Palaeolithic societies as to truly Neolithic ones, as Zvelebil and Lillie (2000, 60) have pointed out: Defined in a polythetic way and deprived of a common central characteristic, Neolithization remains a vague and vaporous neologism, any concrete meaning of which is obliterated by the polythetic nature of the phenomenon and the regionally variable composition of its attributes. For Zvelebil and Lillie this common central characteristic can only be the introduction and the development of agro-pastoral farming. One alternative is to accept that processes of neolithisation may operate on several different, but overlapping, time-scales in any given region. In an innovative study of neolithisation in Egypt, Shirai (2006) considers the adoption of settled agriculture in the context of three time-frames: a long-term context of Early Holocene climate change and human cognitive development; a medium-term context of demographic change and intensification of socio-cultural networks, and; a short-term impact of socially-prominent individuals whose unpredictable behaviour may have had significant influence on broader social trends and structures. This is a debate that is likely to run for some time to come, but as the evidence increases for significant experimentation and localised variability in developments from hunter-forager to villager-herder the likelihood is that the future requirement will be for greater, not lesser, flexibility in use of the term neolithisation, while at the same time stressing the role of locale-specific factors in any application of the term.

The neolithisation of Iran: patterns of change and continuity

In approaching the neolithisation of Iran specifically, the first point should be to stress that Iran was not an empty land prior to the Neolithic. Much evidence exists for a significant human presence in the Zagros region and across the Iranian plateau through all phases of the Palaeolithic, including the Upper Palaeolithic and, at least in some areas, the Epi-Palaeolithic (Smith 1986; Olzewski and Dibble 1993; Otte et al. 2009; Vahdati Nasab 2011). There is every likelihood, moreover, that significant numbers of early prehistoric sites, especially on the Iranian Plateau, remain buried under Holocene sediments (Kozlowski 1999, 23). A related point is that there is considerable evidence for continuity in the cultural and material traditions of communities of Iran across the Palaeolithic-Neolithic transition, supporting the interpretation of autochthonous development in many regions. These continuities are attested in material forms such as the persistence of chipped stone tool technologies (Kozlowski 1999; Kozlowski and Aurenche 2005), and also in modes of behaviour such as a millennia-long preference for hunting of wild goat in the Zagros region (Chapter Two; Zeder and Hesse 2000, 2257).

It is now clear that the earliest developments in the processes of change sweeping across Southwest Asia from the start of the Holocene onwards were not confined to the areas comprising the Fertile Crescent which, in the case of Iran, means the Zagros chain of mountains and associated plains and valleys (Fig. 1.1). Kozlowski (1999, 59) has argued persuasively for the presence of Early Neolithic communities to the southwest of the Zagros zone, at least on the fringes of the Mesopotamian plain in the Tigris valley, their sites now buried deep under Holocene alluvium. Such occupation is almost certainly attested in the briefly excavated Aceramic Neolithic site of Rihan III in the Hamrin region of the western Zagros foot-hills (Matthews 2000, 50) and the unexcavated site of Tamerkhan further to the southeast in the Mandali region (Oates 1968). Otherwise, we have little idea of the role played by the Tigris valley region in the earliest Neolithic of the eastern wing of the Fertile Crescent. Other regions of Iran and adjacent countries remain equally obscure as regards their Early Neolithic developments, but recent discoveries at Tang-e Bolaghi in the southern Zagros, for example (Chapter Seven), suggest the possibility of an autochthonous process of neolithisation in at least this region of Iran.

The timing and rates of change from hunter-forager to villager-farmer, of neolithisation itself, were clearly diverse and locally specific both across Southwest Asia and across Iran, contingent upon a range of factors such as micro-climate variation, availability of desired resources, and degree of entrenchment of resistant or open cultural and material traditions, with the result that The different centers underwent ‘neolithization’ independently of one another, with some centers being free to completely ignore the process for a long time – there was no duty to become Neolithic, in Kozlowski’s (1999, 25) phrases. In his thoughtful study of the Neolithic of the Central Anatolian Plain, Schoop (2005) makes a similar point about resistance to the spread of Neolithic practices by communities of hunter-gatherers living for some 1500 years in close proximity to settled farming communities, because it was not viable for them – neither economically nor, presumably, in terms of ideology and social organization (Schoop 2005, 53). There was not, therefore, a single neolithisation of Iran, but a gradual unfolding of multiple episodes of neolithisation forming patterns of change, continuity and adaptation over several millennia (Tringham 2000, 53 also finds the idea of a mosaic an attractive concept, not just for its expression of environmental diversity….but as an expression of diversity in experiencing the Neolithization process). Again we hope that this book will give some idea of the basic features, at least, of that mosaic.

A word on chronology is appropriate here. Most authorities equate the start of the Neolithic with the start of the Holocene era at the end of the Younger Dryas at 9600 BC (Watkins 2009, 201). The preceding period, approximately 20,000–9600 BC, is termed the Epi-Palaeolithic or final Upper Palaeolithic. Some researchers (Solecki et al. 2004) use the term ‘Proto-Neolithic’ to refer to the period spanning c.11,000–8300 BC, equating it with the Late Natufian and PPNA in the Levant, but we prefer not to use this rather value-laden term. Instead, at least for the chronology of Iran, we use the term Early Neolithic with regard to the period 9600–7000 BC and Later Neolithic for the period 7000–5500 BC. Broadly, the Early Neolithic is pre-ceramic while the Later Neolithic starts with the development of ceramic technologies (Voigt and Dyson 1992). There is scope for multiple sub-divisions within these broad timespans, and above all there is a serious need for a concerted programme of ¹⁴C dating for the entire span of Iranian prehistory, building on the past decade of renewed fieldwork across most regions of Iran (Azarnoush and Helwing 2005).

In considering the spread of Neolithic lifestyles across Iran it is useful to divide the country into zones which can be treated in turn: the Central Zagros; the North Zagros and Azerbaijan; the South Zagros and Khuzestan; Fars and South Iran; the Central Plateau; Northeast Iran; Southeast Iran. The chapters in this volume are arranged according to these geographical divisions. In each case the evidence for the neolithisation of that region needs to be considered on its own terms. The Central Zagros region appears to be a ‘formative zone’ (Özdoğan 2005) where human groups worked at their own neolithisation without significant external input (Chapter Two). Exciting new discoveries along the length and breadth of the Zagros chain, at sites such as East Chia Sabz and Chogha Golan, are steadily restating this region’s significance in the very earliest stages of neolithisation (Chapters Three–Six).

For the North Zagros and Azerbaijan region, by contrast, the evidence suggests a Ceramic Neolithic presence only by the late seventh and early sixth millennia BC (Ajorloo 2008), prior to the earliest occupation at Hajji Firuz (Voigt 1983), but there is as yet no evidence for human presence in the region in the critical millennia between 10,000 and 6200 BC. Ceramic parallels between Hajji Firuz and early Hassuna sites in Upper Mesopotamia suggest possible migration of fully-fledged farmers into the region from outside (Voigt 1983, 166), but further fieldwork is required in order to address this issue.

Some regions of Iran appear to be sparsely occupied, if at all, during the Early Neolithic period, with secure evidence for Holocene human settlement not attested until the later seventh millennium BC or later, as several studies presented in this volume indicate. In the Fars region of southern Iran Neolithic settlement had appeared to start from c.6200 BC with little evidence for a preceding Pre-Pottery Neolithic presence (Chapter Eight; Weeks et al. 2006). Recent discoveries at the Tang-e Bolaghi sites (Chapter Seven), however, suggest that earlier occupation can be found through intensive fieldwork, and the new ¹⁴C dates for the lower levels of Rahmatabad (Chapter Nine) firmly indicate a late eighth millennium BC presence in the region. Weeks et al. (2006, 24) have pointed to the possible significance of a major episode of climatic deterioration at about 6200 BC (Alley et al. 1997; Staubwasser and Weiss 2006), the 8.2 kya event, for the spread of Neolithic life-ways out of the formative Central Zagros zone and into multiple regions of Iran and beyond into western Central Asia (Harris 2010, 235), but finer resolution of local and regional palaeoclimatic data is sorely needed in order to address this point. The appearance of Neolithic communities across the plains of Kashan, Tehran and Qazvin (Chapters Ten–Thirteen) comes relatively late in the period, accompanied by the distinctive chaff-tempered soft-wares of the Ceramic Neolithic. The widespread distribution of these ceramic wares, as well as of traded commodities such as bitumen, cold-hammered copper and sea shells, underlines the connectivity of human communities across all of Iran in the centuries around 6000 BC.

The appearance in some regions of animals and plants outside their natural distribution in the wild, as in the case of sheep, goats and cereals at sites on the Khuzestan plain for example (Hole 1977), strongly suggests their introduction by human communities from outside rather than in situ neolithisation (Zeder and Hesse 2000, 2257; Pereira and Amorim 2010, 5). Such a scenario seems also likely for the spread of Neolithic life-ways north-eastwards beyond Iran and into western Central Asia, as attested by the adoption of Neolithic modes of food production at Jeitun (Harris 2010; Harris and Gosden 1996). The new dating and discoveries at several sites in northeastern Iran including Sang-e Chakhmaq, Pookerdvall and Rashak III (Chapters Fourteen–Seventeen), as well as at Tepe Pahlavan on the Jajarm Plain (Vahdati 2010), and in southeastern Iran at Tell-e Atashi (Chapter Eighteen) hint at the significance of multiple regional centres within Iran as key nodes in the early development of Neolithic societies in this region and their spread outwith.

Permanent or even long-term residence in villages was not the only destination in the transition to village-farming across Iran. The development of pastoral nomadic lifestyles is a key component of animal domestication and a prominent feature of the Iranian Neolithic and later periods (Abdi 2003; Alizadeh 2003). While notoriously difficult to identify in the archaeological record, seasonal campsites of mobile pastoralists, as arguably attested at Tepe Tula’i on the edge of the Susiana plain (Hole 1974; Pires-Ferreira 1977; Bernbeck 1992), suggest a complex and shifting mix of sedentism and seasonal mobility as characterising the Iranian Neolithic in many regions. Even Later Neolithic sites, such as Chahar Boneh on the Qazvin Plain or Sarab in the Central Zagros, may have been occupied only seasonally (Fazeli Nashli et al. 2009, 3). The severe vertical topography of much of Iran and its impact on seasonal patterns of vegetation (Zohary 1963) was of major significance in structuring plant, animal and human interactions as the Early Holocene climate became established. Likewise, adoption of the full farming package of domesticated plants and animals was only one amongst many possible pathways for newly Neolithic communities to pursue. In the Fars region, for example, exploitation of domesticated two-row and six-row barley and emmer and einkorn wheat (Miller and Kimiaie 2006) was accompanied by a reliance on hunting of onager, aurochs and gazelle, with limited consumption of probably wild goats (Mashkour 2006).

In sum, when we consider the development and spread of Neolithic lifestyles across the entirety of Iran, and beyond, we may profitably envisage it in terms recently applied to the spread of agriculture across Europe, which involved different mechanisms probably involving new groups of colonizing farmers, exchanges of population between foragers and farmers, and indigenous adoption by foragers….there were a variety of ways in which agriculture spread, either carried by new people or moving as ideas and materials beyond existing farming groups to local foraging populations (Price 2000, 18).

Future directions for the study of the neolithisation of Iran

The study of the neolithisation of Iran, as a series of becomings (Whittle 1996, 9) across a highly diverse range of landscapes, will be taken forward in future years, opportunities permitting, through the integrated application of multiple lines of approach to the archaeological record. Firstly, a high-resolution chronology needs to be established for the Neolithic of the entire country, constructed step by step through a systematic programme of ¹⁴C dating using excavated samples from securely stratified sequences, such as those presented throughout this volume. Such a programme will not only provide a chronological framework against which to interpret broad sequences of Early and Later Neolithic developments across Iran but will also enable detailed appreciation of intra-regional and intra-site continuities and changes in the shift from hunterforager to villager-herder. Using Bayesian modelling to approach multiple samples from within and beyond individual sites, as for example in Whittle’s recent study (2011, see also Vander Linden 2011) of Neolithic chronology in southern Britain, will enable consideration of specific developments in architecture, subsistence and material culture, for example, at the level of human generations and even lifetimes.

Secondly, study of the neolithisation of Iran will benefit from consideration and application of theoretically innovative approaches recently and currently taken to the neolithisation of Europe, as typified by such studies as Whittle (1996; 2003), Barrett (2011) and Chapman (2011). As one example, Chapman’s (2011) analysis of design aesthetics, rooted in analysis of specific attributes of items and categories of material culture, provides a promising avenue for exploration of material such as chipped stone tool assemblages or stone and bone beads or figurines, for example, in the Iranian context. To what extent can a design aesthetic be articulated for the Early Neolithic of Iran and how might such an aesthetic be understood to operate across large and diverse regions of the country? Might such an understanding be situated, as Chapman’s study is, within Neustupný’s (1998) concepts of place, whereby places are either ‘familiar’ (home settlement), ‘other’ (from other settlements but sharing material culture) or ‘foreign’ (distant, different material culture)? And against such contexts of place and shared aesthetics, how best to apprehend the scale of phenomena such as the movement of obsidian and carnelian, whether as tools or raw materials, from distant sources into and across the Iranian Neolithic world?

As a further example, there is a need for theoretically-informed consideration of gender and age in the Early Neolithic of Iran. Such an approach will build on the novel work of Daems (2004; 2008) in analysing gendered aspects of human figurines from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods of Iran. Her wide-ranging study demonstrates the prevalence of explicitly female over male figurines across Neolithic Iran and Mesopotamia, which Daems (2008, 98) associates with a desire of Neolithic communities to understand and socially situate bodily changes in the female form whereby figurines might form components of social rituals and events accompanying critical stages in the female lifecycle. Multiple avenues of approach to gender in the Neolithic of Southwest Asia have been articulated in a recent review by Bolger (2010), who considers the potential for gendered understanding of issues such as food production and consumption, treatment of the dead, and cult and ritual, rightly critiquing previous studies of male-female Neolithic lifestyles as employing stereotypical, polarized conceptions of male and female behaviour (Bolger 2010, 526), and laying stress on integrated approaches that employ multiple strands of theory and evidence. A systematic approach specifically to gender and age in the neolithisation of Iran has yet to be conceptualised, but an innovative integrated framework for a programme of this nature has been deftly constructed in Croucher’s recent study of the Neolithic Near East, with the ultimate aim of integrating gender and age studies fully into archaeological research paradigms (Croucher2012, 155).

Finally, fully