Ganj Dareh Then and Now: Integrating Past and Current Research

Date/Time: 
Friday, May 7, 2021 - 12:00pm to 2:00pm
(ADT)
Room: 
3
Organizer(s): 
  • Julien Riel-Salvatore, Université de Montréal
  • Sanaz Shirvani, Université de Montréal
Session Description (300 word max): 

The Aceramic Neolithic site of Ganj Dareh, excavated 1967-1974 by Canadian archaeologist Philip E.L. Smith (Université de Montréal), occupies a central place in discussions about the nature and tempo of cultural evolution across the transition to an agro-pastoralist lifeway. A number of preliminary reports were complemented in the early 2000s by new studies on the animal and human remains at the sites, establishing it as a locus for early goat domestication just over 10,000 years ago and showing its occupants were descended from local hunter-gatherers and unrelated to the early farming populations from the western Fertile Crescent. This has prompted both renewed fieldwork at the site and efforts to organize and analyze the large collections accumulated during Smith’s original excavations, currently housed at UdeM. This session aims to bring together members of different research groups that have tended to work in isolation on various aspects of Ganj Dareh, in order to present ongoing research on the site and chart new, integrated courses of action for future work.

Presentations
12:00 PM: Excavating archives: new insights into the stratigraphy at Ganj Dareh
Presentation format:
Author(s):
  • Andrew Lythe - Université de Montréal
  • Julien Riel-Salvatore - Université de Montréal

Ganj Dareh is an Aceramic Neolithic site in the Central Zagros and has the potential to enhance our understanding of the onset of the Neolithic. At present, all publications concerning Ganj Dareh have identified five major occupation horizons, referred to as levels A to E, from top to bottom. Although the absence of structural features clearly distinguishes level E from levels D to A, levels D to A remain largely archaeologically indistinguishable. Furthermore, the stratigraphic horizons that exist within each of these levels have not been clearly defined. In this report, we present the results of a meticulous reanalysis of the original excavation documentation from the 1971 field season in four adjacent trenches and identify fourteen distinct stratigraphic horizons were identified. This presentation presents the first clear definition of the vertical and horizontal coordinates of each occupation horizon at Ganj Dareh, as well as describes the archaeological features such as hearths or walls they include. This first step provides a better understanding of Ganj Dareh’s stratigraphy and provides us with the necessary context from which a more robust chronological framework can be constructed, while developing a more nuanced picture of the full complexity of Ganj Dareh’s archaeological record. 

12:10 PM: Resurrecting old data: spatial reconstruction of the 1967-74 excavations at Ganj Dareh
Presentation format:
Author(s):
  • Alejandra Uribe Albornoz - Université de Montréal
  • Julien Riel-Salvatore - Université de Montréal

The absence of published stratigraphic sequence and spatial extent of the different levels from the site of Ganj Dareh (Iran) have hampered a holistic understanding of the site’s shifting human occupation over time. In this study, we digitized the master list of excavation units from Smith’s 1967-1974 excavations and imported the resulting data into a GIS in order to resolve some of these issues. This allowed three things: First, it permitted a detailed reconstruction of the plan view of the site. Second, it allowed the production of a dynamic 3D model of the excavated area into which individual features could be inserted to capture their stratigraphic and planimetric relationships to different phases of occupation. Third, we were able to generate elevation maps for each of Smith’s five levels, which show that there were diachronic shifts in the site’s occupied area over time and serve to demonstrate Smith’s impression that Level C was restricted to the western part of the mound. We conclude by exploring the potential of these data to be integrated in future work at the site to correlate past data to ongoing research at the site.

12:20 PM: The 1967-1974 Ganj Dareh collections: New light on lithic technological organization
Presentation format:
Author(s):
  • Julien Riel-Salvatore - Université de Montréal
  • Lyne Grondin - Université de Montréal

The Aceramic Neolithic site of Ganj Dareh (Kermanshah, Iran) is arguably one of the most significant sites for enhancing our understanding of goat domestication and the onset of sedentism. Despite its central importance, it has proven difficult to obtain contextually reliable data from it and integrate the site in regional syntheses because it was never published in full after excavations ceased in 1974. This paper presents the Ganj Dareh archive at Université de Montréal and shows how the documentation and artifacts it comprises still offer a great deal of useful information about the site. In particular, building on the refined stratigraphic understanding proposed by our team, we explore two possible pre-agricultural levels (H-01 and P-01) and explore the spatial distribution of lithics. This allows us to highlight some differences in lithic technological organization in levels H-01 and P-01 suggestive of higher degrees of residential mobility than subsequent phases of occupation at the site. These data help refine our understanding of Ganj Dareh’s occupational history and recenter it as a key site to improve our understanding the Neolithization process in the Middle East.

12:30 PM: First Observations on the 1967-74 Clay Object from Ganj Dareh
Presentation format:
Author(s):
  • Sanaz Shirvani - Université de Montréal

Ganj Dareh is a small settlement located in a valley located southeast of Kermanshah in the Central Zagros, Iran. It is considered as one of the earliest Neolithic sites, having been radiocarbon dated to ca. 10,200 – 9,900 years BP. While many observations from the site have demonstrated fundamental shifts in the social life of its occupants, Ganj Dareh site is also noteworthy for having yielded hundreds of clay figurines and tokens. Philip Smith and other scholars have argued this corpus of artifacts as one of the most significant innovations of Early Neolithic material culture, but their function and variability remain unclear to this day. In this paper, based on Smith's documentation we tabulate the kinds of tokens and figurines across the five original level to test the idea of Riel-Salvatore et al. (2021) that Level H-01 is devoid of clay objects, which first appear in overlying Level E-01. Another aim of this paper is to see whether the clay tokens from Ganj Dareh support or invalidate Bennison-Chapman's ideas about their multifunctional nature in the Early Neolithic as a whole.

12:40 PM: Remembering the Ancestors: Burial Practices at Ganj Dareh
Presentation format:
Author(s):
  • Deborah C. Merrett - Simon Frasier University
  • Christopher  Meiklejohn - University of Winnipeg

Burials beneath house floors have long been recognized as a predominant practice in the Early Neolithic of the Near East. Although exhibiting variability from region to region the widespread similarities include clustering of burials within and under burned building. Burial practices in the Central Zagros have not been as closely examined as in the Levant and Anatolia. ‘Who has been buried beneath house floors’ is a fundamental question in Early Neolithic bioarchaeology. Here we explore burial as a vital component of social memory construction in the Early Neolithic of Central Zagros of Iran at Ganj Dareh ca. 10,000 cal B.P.

 

Clusters of burials were observed in both levels D and C. Successful extraction of aDNA from individuals in one cluster in Level D demonstrates that related individuals were buried within a single archaeological structure. Age-at-death analysis suggests that not all deaths occurred at the same time. Memory within the house of burial locations facilitates burial of additional family members at later dates. We suggest that houses are part of the mnemonic of burial, social memory, and meaning that creates embodied spaces, often accompanied with large scale burning of the structures as an integral part of social memory preservation processes.

01:00 PM: Goat genomes from Ganj Dareh and the Zagros highland
Presentation format:
Author(s):
  • Kevin Daly - Trinity College Dublin
  • Daniel  Bradley - Trinity College Dublin
  • Melinda  Zeder - Smithsonian Institution
  • Lisa Yeomans - University of Copenhagen
  • Pernille Bangsgaard - University of Copenhagen
  • Marjan Mashkour - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Ganj Dareh provides some of the earliest evidence of goat management by humans. We assess goat remains from Ganj Dareh, using a combination of genomic and archaeozoological methods. Genetic data indicate two clusters of animals: a larger group with domestic affinity, and a smaller cohort with wild affinity. Goat from throughout the site’s occupation (Smith Level A-E) show genetic and demographic indications of management; mitochondrial and Y chromosome markers echo demographic traces of reduced male survival and a larger female breeding population. The genetic legacy of management is also revealed by large regions of homozygosity, implying recent kin breeding among Ganj Dareh goats. Similar analyses of goat from Tepe Abdul Hosein indicate that these signals were not exclusive to Ganj Dareh, and may represent animal management practises shared throughout the Central Zagros highlands. The eastern region of Fertile Crescent, as evidenced by our cross-disciplinary study of the goat of Ganj Dareh, is key to deepening our understanding of the emergence of herd management in southwest Asia.

01:10 PM: Re-Excavating Ganj Dareh: the 2017 and 2018 seasons
Presentation format:
Author(s):
  • Tobias Richter - University of Copenhagen
  • Hojjat Darabi - University of Copenhagen
  • Cecilie Lelek Tvetmarken - University of Copenhagen
  • Christoph Purschwitz - University of Copenhagen
  • Peder Mortenses - University of Copenhagen

We present an overview of the 2017 and 2018 excavations at Ganj Dareh, the site’s stratigraphy, architecture, dating, and material culture. Between 1974 and when our new research began, the site had severely suffered since Smith’s excavation areas had been left open and not sufficiently backfilled and had severely eroded with many profiles slumping and collapsing. Construction of a tarmac road had damaged the southern part of the mound, while ploughing in the surrounding fields was damaging its edges. Finally, several looting pits and tunnels further undermined its stability and integrity. In 2017 we were given the opportunity by the Iranian Centre for Archaeological Research to re-investigate Ganj Dareh as part of the Tracking Cultural and Environmental Change: the late Epipalaeolithic and early Neolithic in the Seimarreh Valley (TCEC) project. Two eight-week excavation seasons took place in the summer of 2017 and 2018 focusing on two areas of the mound (Area A and D) and the area surrounding it. Work on the mound aimed to re-document the stratigraphy of the site and especially to obtain samples for radiometric dating, archaeobotanical analysis, and micromorphology. The work around the mound aimed to establish the presence and extent of sub-surface archaeology around it.

01:20 PM: A revised radiocarbon chronology of Ganj Dareh
Presentation format:
Author(s):
  • Joe Roe - University of Copenhagen

The absolute chronology of Ganj Dareh is known from some 41 previously published radiocarbon dates, including those on Smith’s original samples of bulk carbon and charcoal (Hole 1987), goat bone collagen (Zeder and Hesse 2000) and human skeletal remains (Meiklejohn et al. 2017). Here I present a further 59 dates from the renewed Copenhagen–Razi excavations, sampled from securely-identified charcoal and charred seeds and processed at the Aarhus AMS Centre. This expanded sample, together with the clarified stratigraphy revealed by the reexcavation, allows for the construction of the first robust Bayesian chronological model of the site. The results confirm that Ganj Dareh was occupied for a relatively short period between 10,200 and 9450 cal BP, though with slightly longer duration (580–750 years) than previously estimated. The Bayesian model also tightly constrains the site’s internal chronology, opening the way for fresh insights into the evolution of animal and human lifeways over this critical period in the emergence of agriculture.

01:30 PM: Re-visiting the Neolithic plant-based subsistence in the Eastern Fertile Crescent; new insights from Ganj Dareh
Presentation format:
Author(s):
  • Amaia Arranz-Otaegui - University of Copenhagen
  • Golnaz Ahadi - University of Copenhagen
  • Anne Frijda Schmidt - university of Cambridge

Van Zeist et al.’s detailed analyses of Ganj Dareh provided a wealth of information about the types of plant species exploited by its inhabitants over time, reconstructed the vegetation and evaluated its evolution during the early Holocene.  They wondered however why key cultivars like emmer were not exploited at the site, and what the relationship with other farming communities in the area could have been. To answer these questions, archaeobotanical studies were re-initiated in 2017, benefitting from recent advances including the study of: 1) a wide range of plant macroremains (i.e. seeds and wood charcoal, but also underground storage organs, animal dung and carbonised food remains); 2) the integration of plant microremains such as phytoliths and starch; and 3) the inter-disciplinary analyses of adobe-brick samples; 4) the application of stable isotope analyses. Recovered plant remains were also directly dated to resolve previous chronological uncertainties, their contextual integrity assessed through detailed micromorphological analyses, and additional stable isotope analyses are planned to better understand plant exploitation and cultivation practices at the site. Overall, in this paper we describe the archaeobotanical research plan designed, discuss some preliminary results, and present the main questions that we seek to answer in the upcoming years. 

01:40 PM: Neolithic Female Figurine from Tepe Sarab
Presentation format:
Author(s):
  • Hamed Vahdati Nasab - Tarbiat Modares University
  • Mandan Kazzazi - Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien

Prehistoric human figurines in general and female figurines in particular have been of long-standing interest to archaeologists, but there has been considerable debate about their function. Although early human figurines are often viewed as a corpus, there is considerable variety in body proportions, forms and artistic styles across the vast geographical areas and temporal periods for which they are attested. Here, a metric analysis using the Root Mean Square Deviation (RMSD) technique is used to compare a figurine from Tepe Sarab with contemporaneous and earlier figurines from a broad geographical area. The results of this analysis indicate that there is a clear division in style and body proportions between the female figurines that are made during the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods. Moreover, our results indicate that there are clear differences in style and body proportions between figurines found in Central Europe and the Near East.