A recent find of a possible Lower Palaeolithic assemblage from the foothills of the Zagros Mountains.

BIGLARI, FEREYDOUN ; NOKANDEH, GABRIEL ; HEYDARI, SAMAN 等

The Mehran Plain to the northwest of the Deh Luran Plain is located between the central parts of lowland Mesopotamia and the foothills of the Zagros Mountains at an altitude of 100-400 m a.s.l. After a long hiatus in archaeological fieldwork following the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, in March 1997 a team from the Center for Archaeological Research of the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization, led by the late Ali-Mohammad Khalilian, launched an archaeological survey of the Mehran Plain. The work was continued in March 1999 by G. Nokandeh (field director), F. Biglari, A. Azadi, N. Malek-Ahmadi (archaeologists) and S. Heydari (geomorphologist).

Our team revisited, mapped and sampled 13 previously recorded sites, among them three sites with Palaeolithic artefacts (FIGURE 1). Perhaps the most important among the latter is Amar Merdeg, a cluster of hills covering approximately 6 sq. km to the east of the Konjan-Cham River, north of the town of Mehran. These hills may have been formed by the accumulation of catastrophic flood alluviation during the Pleistocene. They form an undulating skyline cut by river gullies. The source of the sediments is the Aghajari formation and the overlying and Bakhtiyari conglomerate of the Zagros front ranges (Eyvazi 1995). The inner parts of this hilly area were not yet safe for survey because of heavy military waste from the Iran-Iraq War; therefore we only collected two samples from the surface of the eastern and southwestern margins of the area.

[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Raw materials of various qualities are available in the area as pebbles, cobbles, and nodules of chert, sandstone, and small amounts of quartzite. The density and fine quality of these lithic resources may have attracted people from the Palaeolithic period until late prehistoric times. Artefacts form a sparse scatter over the surface of the hills, but at some places have a denser concentration.

Lithic artefacts at Amar Merdeg are characterized by large numbers of tested cobbles, cores, cortical debitage, and a smaller number of tools, suggesting flint-knapping activities at the area (FIGURE 2). Various fine-grained cherts, including fine red, white and brown, and medium grey chert, were used for flake tools while coarse-grained material like sandstone was often modified into chopping tools. Most artefacts are heavily patinated, of which some have multiple levels of patina, indicating that a significant period of time had elapsed between one retouching episode and the subsequent ones. Tools primarily consist of core-choppers (FIGURE 3) and flake tools such as notches, denticulates, side-scrapers and inversely retouched pieces, but lack bifaces. This could be the result of sampling error due to limited survey area, or a real absence of bifaces in the industry.

[Figures 2-3 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The presence of chopping tools and the absence of typologically later artefacts may place Amar Merdeg within the Lower Palaeolithic Period (Bar-Yosef & Goren-Inbar 1993). Some assemblages from open-air sites in the Zagros highlands are characterized by the presence of similar core-choppers (Biglari & Abdi 1999), but Amar Merdeg is the first known Palaeolithic occurrence in the region at such a low altitude (200-300 m a.s.l.) with chopping tools. Since the Palaeolithic sites of lowland regions of Mesopotamia and Susiana are buried by younger sediments, only areas such as the Mehran Plain lying between the lowlands and the foothills of the Zagros Mountains can provide us with further insights into adaptive strategies of Palaeolithic people in the region. To ascertain further the date of this assemblage and establish its stratigraphic context, we plan to collect more samples from various locales in the area, and to excavate selected areas in future seasons of fieldwork.

References

BIGLARI, F. & K. ABDI. 1999. Paleolithic artifacts from Cham-e Souran, the Islamabad Plain, Central Western Zagros Mountains, Iran, Archaologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan 31: 1-8.

EYVAZI, J. 1995. Geomorphology of Iran. Tehran: Payam-e Nour University Press. (In Persian.)

BAR-YOSEF, O. & N. GOREN-INBAR. 1993. The lithic assemblage of `Ubeidiya: A Lower Paleolithic site in the Jordan Valley. Jerusalem: Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

FEREYDOUN BILARI, GABRIEL NOKANDEH & SAMAN HEYDARI, Biglari, Department of Archaeology, Abhar Azad University, Abhar, Iran. [email protected] Heydari, Center for Archaeological Research, Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization, Azadi Avenue, Tehran, Iran. Nokandeh, Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization, Golestan Province, Gorgan, Iran.