- Julien Riel-Salvatore, Université de Montréal
- Sanaz Shirvani, Université de Montréal
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.