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Seek, and you shall nd: 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; 978-
1-78297-223-5 hardback 40.
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; 978-
1-78297-190-0 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 rst 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
*
The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, 1155 East 58
t h
Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
(Email: a-alizadeh@uchicago.edu)
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 rst phase of
sedentism in early Neolithic Iran.
Scientic 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).
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 0008000 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
reected 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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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.
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 one-
day 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.
There are four major questions about the evolution
of the early Neolithic period: where, when, why and
how? The rst 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 rst 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 eld
(the literature on this debate is large and complex; see
Watkins 2011 for a summary).
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
evidencein the Central Zagros region at leastto
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 nds 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
cohesion (Pollock & Bernbeck 2010: 276, 28586).
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 objectswhich would not survive. As
a result, they wisely postpone any solution for the
why question until more data can be systematically
collected and studied.
Both booksespecially the secondalso 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 inuence from the formative
zones in south-west Asia (e.g. Whittle 1996;
Kozowski 1999; Zeder 1999, 2005; Zeder & Smith
2009).
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 Readings Central
Zagros Archaeological Project (CZAP) and the
Iranian Cultural Heritage, Handicraft and Tourism
Organization(ICHHTO). The book is organisedinto
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 rock-
shelters 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 T-
shaped interior. The north-east end of this room was
furnished with ve sheep and goat skulls (pp. 4344).
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 oor, base of
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the walls, or their height are indicated on the plans
(gs. 4.22 & 4.28). Excavations did not penetrate
below this building level.
At Jani (c. 81607950 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 oors 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
excavatedfor 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.
In The neolithisation of Iran, the editors, inspired
by

Ozdo gans (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, dened
as the locus of the earliest evidence of domestication
and sedentism without obvious external inuence of
any signicance; others are considered as learning
zones (p. 3), i.e. regions that were inuenced
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 rst 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
Irans early Neolithic and a major incentive for
future research on this fundamental era of cultural
evolution.
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