Establishing an Absolute Chronological Framework for the Late Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age in Iraqi Kurdistan: Radiocarbon Dates From Kani Shaie

Abstract

The possibility to conduct new fieldwork projects in previously largely unexplored Iraqi Kurdistan during the past decade has reinvigorated research into the transformative fifth to third millennium BCE (Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age) in southwest Asia when human societies grew from small, autonomous villages to centralized states with urban centers. Major efforts to synchronize stratigraphic sequences from various sites in order to reach a consensus on archaeological periodization and to identify the absolute chronology of societal transformations necessarily focused on available datasets from Syria, Turkey, and Iran. However, increased understanding of differences in communities’ adoption, adaptation, or rejection of new forms of technologies and social organization demands the need for constructing region-specific absolute chronological models for comparative analysis. Such work is particularly challenging in the case of Iraqi Kurdistan where sites frequently have major hiatuses in occupation. The site of Kani Shaie (Sulaymaniyah Governorate) offers the rare opportunity to investigate the Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age with a largely uninterrupted sequence of occupation from ca. 5500 to 2500 BCE. This paper presents a series of fourteen radiocarbon dates, representing every archaeological period in this timeframe, as a first step toward the construction of a regional absolute chronology.

New Radiocarbon Dates for the Middle Chalcolithic Period of the Central Zagros, Iran

“…Such sites are, in fact, Dalma-related, which usually contain a small amount of Dalma Impressed ware in their otherwise different ceramic assemblages. Following these requirements, none of the Mahidasht sites, such as Siahbid and Chogha Maran, with Red-Slipped and Dalma Impressed components belong to the Dalma period, because, first, they are lacking the characteristic Dalma Monochrome (Henrickson 1983;Renette et al 2021aRenette et al , 2022, and second, the quantities of these two Dalma ceramics in their ceramic assemblages are small, highly outnumbered by local ceramic types (e.g., Renette et al 2022:29, Figure 3). This is the case also for several sites in the east of the Tigris which either contain only small amount of Dalma Impressed, such as Kani Shaei, Phase VII and VIb (Renette et al 2021a), or contain a small amount of both Dalma Impressed and Dalma Monochrome, such as Surezha (Stein 2018:43;Stein and Fisher 2020:142).…”