Legacy Data and Ceramic Chronologies: The Case of the Gorgan Plain, Northeastern Iran

Summary

After the passage of the Iranian Antiquities Law of 1930, the Gorgan Plain in northeastern Iran was seen as one of the most promising regions in the Old World for archaeological research. Despite decades of pioneering field and laboratory research, northeastern Iran still lacks a regionally integrated ceramic chronology for significant stretches of its archaeological history, particularly the 3rd millennium BCE. While individual sequences from important sites such as Tureng Tepe and Shah Tepe are well known, the precise nature of their relationships to each other and to other less-well known neighboring sites have remained unclear. This lacuna in our understanding of the culture history of the region presents a major obstacle to developing models of the social, political and economic history of the Gorgan. This paper, therefore, presents the results of research aimed at constructing a regionally integrated ceramic chronology for this region, in light of the potential anthropological significance of this dataset with respect to the emergence of regional community networks and the formation of archaic complex polities. In addition, this paper reflects on important issues related to the rehabilitation of legacy data and the methods by which it may be restructured for effective quantitative analysis.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21528