This paper addresses the questions of when regular harvesting and cultivation of future domesticates began and considers how recent excavations from Ghar-e Boof and Chogha Golan in the Zagros mountains of Iran contribute to this discussion. Building on the research tradition of archaeologists including Robert Braidwood and Frank Hol, who worked in Iran and Iraq in the decades leading to Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Tübingen-Iranian Stone Age Research Project (TISARP), focuses on a diachronic interdisciplinary approach. Starting in 2024, the members of TISARP have conducted surveys and excavations in multiple regions of Iran. This work views the archaeological record as a limited resource and advocates conducting smaller excavations more slowly, rather than quickly excavating great volumes of sediments that can destroy large parts of sites. Clearly, small-scale excavations are not ideal for addressing the spatial organization of entire villages. Nonetheless, the small-scale excavations conducted by the TISARP team have produced a number of breakthroughs for our understanding the lifeways of Paleolithic and early Neolithic peoples. This presentation highlights how small excavations have yielded high quality data that have revised our views of how Neanderthals and modern
humans harvested and cultivated plants, eventually leading to farming that forms the economic basis for Neolithic and all subsequent societies.
Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Middle East Studies Center