New Evidence of Two Transitions in the Neolithic Sequence of Northeastern Iran.

As early as the 1950s the Zagros range in western Iran has been one of the main arenas for seeking the earliest villages and domestication of plants and animals in the eastern wing of the Fertile Crescent. Pioneering works of Robert Braidwood during the 1950s and early 1960s at a number of sites in Iraqi Kurdestan and the central Zagros region of western Iran, such as Karim Shahir, Jarmo, Asiab, Sarab, not only produced the first information on the Neolithic of this region, but also motivated a series of fieldworks targeting the Neolithic period in western Iran during the 1960s–1970s (e.g., Braidwood 1960). Excavations at the early Neolithic sites of Guran, Ganj Darreh, Abdul Hosein, Ali Kosh, and Chogha Sefid during these two decades contributed significantly to a clearer picture of the Neolithic of the Zagros region and suggested this region as one possible center of early domestication in the Near East (e.g., Hole, Flannery, and Neely 1969). Although this status of the Zagros was partly eclipsed because of both a two-decade hiatus in Neolithic research during 1980s–1990s and the concurrent, increasing investigations on the early Neolithic in the Levant and southeastern Anatolia, it seems that the Zagros is regaining its position regarding early domestication and the initial stages of the Neolithic way of life in the Fertile Crescent through the crucial information obtained from recent excavations at some early Holocene sites, such as Chogha Golan and Sheikhi Abad (e.g., Matthews, Matthews, and Homamadifar 2013 ; Riehl et al. 2015). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]