No Aryans Needed: Toward explaining the distribution of Burnished Grey Ware Ceramics of the Third Millennium in Northeastern Iran

Summary

The Gorgan Plain in Iran has long been considered to be an important part of the northern frontier of the Ancient Near East. Only recently, however, has this region been considered a center of complex society in its own right during the third millennium BCE. While no society in this frontier zone would achieve literate statehood until much later, there is nevertheless mounting evidence that the societies of northeastern Iran developed incipient urbanism, craft specialization, and organized irrigation networks, among many other hallmarks of ‘civilization’ during the Bronze Age. Unfortunately, considerable confusion remains regarding basic cultural sequences of ceramics, architecture, craft production, agriculture, and animal husbandry. Due to the nature of the published materials, discussion tends to revolve around a few key issues; the most widely published and commented upon cultural materials from northeastern Iran are the Burnished Grey Wares made famous by Erich Schmidt’s excavations at Tepe Hissar. This paper focuses on integrating the available Burnished Grey Ware materials into a framework that adequately describes the variation in this assemblage over time and space and evaluating different hypotheses that could possibly account for the observed distribution.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage