Hominid Stamps:The Philatelic Medium as a Tool Contributing to Nationalism

While depiction of iconic archaeological finds or monuments of archaeological, historical, cultural or natural significance on postage stamps printed by many countries around the globe to promote nationalist sentiments as means of creating or promoting national cohesion, especially in ethnically diverse countries, is by no means unusual, the question posed in this paper, with specific focus on paleoanthropological finds, is that how far back in time this practice can be traced, and how images of hominid fossils from hundreds of thousands, sometime millionsof years ago, can be of contribution to promoting nationalism in various countries. Using semiotics of how stamps function to convey meaning, it has been explored how images of hominids on stamps contribute to a broad program of building a national identity and strengthening nationalism in different countries around the globe

An Early Second-Millennium Cuneiform Archive from Chogha Gavaneh, Western Iran

Edition of a small archive of cuneiform tablets from a site in the Zagros Mountains, with discussion of its archaeological context.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/77474/1/JCS59.pd

A Neanderthal from the Central Western Zagros, Iran. Structural reassessment of the Wezmeh 1 maxillary premolar

Wezmeh Cave, in the Kermanshah region of Central Western Zagros, Iran, produced a Late Pleistocene faunal assemblage rich in carnivorans along with a human right maxillary premolar, Wezmeh 1, an unerupted tooth from an 8 ± 2 year-old individual. Uranium-series analyses of the fauna by alpha spectrometry provided age estimates between 70 and 11 ka. Crown dimensions place the tooth specimen at the upper limits of Late Pleistocene human ranges of variation. Wezmeh 1 metameric position (most likely a P3) remains uncertain and only its surficial morphology has been described so far. Accordingly, we used micro-focus X-ray tomography (12.5 μm isotropic voxel size) to reassess the metameric position and taxonomic attribution of this specimen. We investigated its endostructural features and quantified crown tissue proportions. Topographic maps of enamel thickness (ET) distribution were also generated, and semilandmark-based geometric morphometric analyses of the enamel-dentine junction (EDJ) were performed. We compared Wezmeh 1 with unworn/slightly-moderately worn P3 and P4 of European Neanderthals, Middle Paleolithic modern humans from Qafzeh, an Upper Paleolithic premolar, and Holocene humans. The results confirm that Wezmeh 1 represents a P3. Based on its internal conformation and especially EDJ shape, Wezmeh 1 aligns closely with Neanderthals and is distinct from the fossil and extant modern human pattern of our comparative samples. Wezmeh 1 is thus the first direct evidence of Neanderthal presence on the western margin of the Iranian Plateau

Strategies of herding: Pastoralism in the middle Chalcolithic period of the West Central Zagros Mountains.

This dissertation explores the evolution of pastoralism in the West Central Zagros Mountains from village-based herding in the Neolithic period to initial stages in the formation of full-fledged nomadic pastoralism by the Late Chalcolithic period. This dissertation is based on archaeological fieldwork in the Islamabad Plain in the Zagros Mountains in western Iran, as well as on previous archaeological and ethnographic research in the region. It has been argued that the initial development of pastoralism in the Central Zagros Mountains should be viewed as an adaptive strategy to a highland environment with limited and dispersed resources in order to supplement a primarily agricultural village-based economy. With expansion of the agricultural regime, the distance to be traveled to pastures by herders became greater, and as a consequence, the organization of labor involved in herding had to be modified to meet the more complex task of moving sizable herds over larger areas. This process can be documented in the settlement pattern of the Islamabad Plain in the successive phases of the Chalcolithic period, with sedentary sites growing in number and size in the first half of the period, but dropping in the second half in favor of a rising number of temporary campsites with increasing distance from the agricultural zone. The evidence from excavations shows closer affiliation in material culture from temporary campsites and sedentary villages in the first half of the Middle Chalcolithic period, while by the second half of the period, campsites show both more specialization in herding activities and evidence for broader interregional contact suggesting large-scale movement usually associated with nomadic pastoralism. While evaluating hypotheses that seek to explain a prehistoric subsistence strategy in the West Central Zagros in the Middle Chalcolithic period, this study contributes both fresh empirical data and theoretical frameworks applicable elsewhere to studies of prehistoric economies, strategies for pastoralism, emergence of nomadic pastoralism, symbiosis between sedentary and nomadic populations, as well as the mechanisms of economic specialization and its social consequences.Ph.D.ArchaeologySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/131122/2/3057882.pd

The Upper Pleistocene brown bear (Carnivora, Ursidae) in the Zagros: Evidence from Wezmeh Cave, Kermanshah, Iran

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Late Pleistocene human remains from Wezmeh Cave, western Iran

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Early Neolithic genomes from the eastern Fertile Crescent

We sequenced Early Neolithic genomes from the Zagros region of Iran (eastern Fertile Crescent), where some of the earliest evidence for farming is found, and identify a previously uncharacterized population that is neither ancestral to the first European farmers nor has contributed significantly to the ancestry of modern Europeans. These people are estimated to have separated from Early Neolithic farmers in Anatolia some 51- 77,000 years ago and show affinities to modern day Pakistani and Afghan populations, but particularly to Iranian Zoroastrians. We conclude that multiple, genetically differentiated hunter-gatherer populations adopted farming in SW-Asia, that components of pre-Neolithic population structure were preserved as farming spread into neighboring regions, and that the Zagros region was the cradle of eastward expansion