Preliminary Report on the Salvage Excavation at the Kolaseg, Guilan-E Gharb of Kermanshah, Iran

Kol eg is locatedat about 6 kilometers southeast of the modern town of Guilan-eGharb in west of KermanshahProvince The site lied in between Mi -khesh and Tagh-tooghmountains the Kol egRiver was passing through the valley during the near past Locating in the reservoir of the Kol egdam and in order to do rescue excavation the site was excavated by the IranianCenter for Archaeological Research ICAR expedition for a season in 2004 The site is composed of two parts a residential area and a cemetery on a platform locating at the foothill of the Mi -kheshMountains The residential part is situated downward at the south of the graveyard close to the Kol egRiver located in the south We could not excavate the whole site because of large span of the site and time limitation especially the cemetery of the sitehas almost remained intact The excavationmethod leads to revealing the vast architectural remains The architecture was made of stone both foundation and walls The excavation has revealed us a large number of noticeable abject related to the Iron Age III such as Pendants Armament Potsherds and Glass sherds and Objects of them are Fibulas and a Cylindrical Seal which are very important for dating the site The comparative study of the material has also proved that the site can definitely be related to the Iron Age II III relying on some marks on the Assyrian appearance in the region by the given tim

New Evidence of Sasanian Burials in the Seymareh Valley, Western Iran

Historical texts and geographic sources as well as archaeological studies place the Seymareh valley, located in present-day Ilam province of Iran, among the regions with great potential of producing outstanding archaeological evidence of the Sasanian period. Yet, the current state of archaeological scholarship in the region by no meansreflects its high capacity. During the field surveys of areas between the Darreh Shahr and Badreh as well as the foothills of the Kabirkuh Mountain range, evidence of burials with rock-cut Astodans (niches) were identified at the villages of Zayed and Fazel-Abad. Judging from the recovered pottery and the comparison of burial spaces with those in other contemporaneous Iranian regions such as Khuzestan and Fars, this type of Sasanian burial spaces and the mountainous climate of the Seymareh valley seem to have played an important part in the adoption of such burial practices in the region

Pre-agricultural plant management in the uplands of the central Zagros: the archaeobotanical evidence from Sheikh-e Abad

Prior to the emergence of agriculture in southwest Asia, sedentarising human communities were experimenting with a diverse range of wild plant species over a prolonged period. In some cases, this involved the cultivation of species that would go on to be domesticated and form the foundation of future agricultural economies. However, many forms of plant use did not follow this trajectory, and in multiple places farming was only taken up later as an established ‘package’. In this paper, we present new archaeobotanical evidence from the Early Neolithic site of Sheikh-e Abad in the central Zagros of western Iran. Sheikh-e Abad is unique in being the only settlement known to date within southwest Asia that lies at an altitude above 1000m and which has occupation spanning the agricultural transition. Thus, it provides a rare opportunity to examine pre-agricultural plant management strategies in an upland zone. Our analyses of the plant remains from Sheikh-e Abad suggest that from its earliest occupation inhabitants were unconsciously ‘auditioning’ a suite of locally available wild grasses which ultimately were never domesticated. We discuss the possible reasons for this from a socio-ecological perspective, considering both the biology and ecology of the plant species in question, as well as the ways in which they were potentially managed

Micostratigraphic approaches to settlement history: integrating field and laboratory analyses at the Neolithic site of Jani, western Iran

This article address settlement history at the Neolithic site of Jani in western Iran, through integrated application of field and laboratory approaches