CHOGHA MARAN: A LOCAL CENTER OF THE CHALCOLITHIC AND EARLY BRONZE AGE IN THE CENTRAL ZAGROS

Between 1975-78, L.D. Levine and his team conducted the largest survey project in the Zagros Mountains - the Mahidasht Survey Project - focusing on four contiguous plains in Kermanshah Province that straddled the major route between Mesopotamia and the Iranian highlands. Four weeks of excavations at the site of Chogha Maran documented a sequence of settlements of the fifth and third millennia BCE. The results from these excavations form to this day the only stratified dataset for these periods in the western central Zagros. The Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age pottery and administrative artifacts from Chogha Maran reveal distinctly local traditions that differ significantly from the contemporary settlement at Godin Tepe in the Kangavar Plain. This article presents the stratigraphy and artifacts from Chogha Maran based on archival research at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and a reanalysis of a large corpus of clay sealings and tokens at the National Museum of Iran in Tehran. Our analysis of this material traces the emergence of small-scale, yet complex societies in the central Zagros, which were fully integrated in the highland-lowland interaction networks while maintaining distinctly local cultural traditions expressed most clearly in potting practices and glyptic imagery.