New Data from Old Materials: Recent Archaeobotanical Investigations on Prehistoric Sites of NW Iran

During ’50s and ‘70s the sites of Hajji Firuz and Pisdeli were excavated in the frame of the Ḥasanlu Project developed by the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Archaeological Service of Iran. That project saw also an Italian partnership for the archaeobotanical analysis, preliminary presented in a brief report. From1977 to 1978 the site of Tappeh Gijlar was investigated by the Italian Institute of Mycenaean and Aegean-Anatolian Studies (ISMEA-CNR) that carried out surface surveys and test excavations in the Orumiyeh and Ušnaviye plains, as well as in the area between Lake Orumiyeh and the Zagros Mountains in Iranian Azerbaijan. A preliminary archaeobotanicalanalysis of the site was presented in the monograph of the ISMEA-CNR project. The sites of Hajji Firuz, Pisdeli, and Tappeh Gijlar, dated between the Neolithic and the Bronze age, are located in the south-western shore of the Orumiyeh Lake, in the Iranian province of West Azerbaijan. This contribution is intended to present new archaeobotanical data, in the frame of the recent environmental studies of the region. Plant remains were retrieved through flotation of samples collected in the sites. Analysis of these plant remains was carried out at the Laboratory of Bioarchaeology of IsMEO, and at the Interdepartmental Center for Archaeological Services of the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. The collection was composed of 10 samples from Hajji Firuz, 4 samples from Pisdeli, and 22 samples from Tappeh Gijlar. More than 500 plant remains respectively from Hajji Firuz and Tappeh Gijlar, and 100 plant remains from Pisdeli occurred in the examined samples, in which cereal grains and spike remains of einkorn/emmer and barley were the dominant remains. In the three sites few remains of pulses, like Lens sp., and weed seeds were present, while at Tappeh Gijlar Linum usitatissimum also occurred. The results of this investigation provided useful information about the agrarian economy and ecology of this region of Iran, between prehistory and protohistory

کلیدواژه ها:

Hajji Firuz ، Pisdeli ، Tappeh Gijlar ، plant remains ، Neolithic ، Chalcolithic ، Bronze age.