Shared Ritual Ideologies: Long Spouted Vessels on the Iranian Plateau in the Third and Second Millennium BCE

Summary

Interactions between Mesopotamia, Iran, and Central Asia during the third and second millennium BCE are well documented with much written on this topic. I will expand on this scholarship by tracing long spouted Iranian vessels across these regions to investigate possible shared ideologies. These vessels are often associated with Iron Age context in northern Iran, but this characteristic trough spout has been present on vessels on the plateau since at least the 4th millennium BCE. This unique design forces the user to confront the vessel’s shape making it an ideal object for transmission of cultural ideas. Depictions in cylinder seals and figural art suggest a possible ritualistic function and grave analysis suggest their inclusion in a ritual set. For this poster, I combine these data with spatial and network analysis to illustrate how these vessels may represent a shared ritual ideology that persisted across the Iranian plateau and Central Asia during the third and second millennium BCE.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage