An analysis of obsidian artifacts excavated during the 1960s at two prominent archaeological sites in southwestern Iran suggest that the networks Neolithic people formed in the region as they developed agriculture are larger and more complex than previously thought.
State-of-the-art analytical tools were used for the first time in a study on a collection of obsidian artifacts. The Neolithic Era is when people began farming, domesticating animals, and establishing permanent settlements on the Deh Luran Plain in Iran.
The obsidian was thought to have been obtained from adormant volcano in Eastern Turkey, and then relied on an unknown second source for the material. The obsidian came from seven different sources in Turkey and Armenia, which is as far away as 1000 miles from the excavation sites.
According to the study's lead author, it wasn't a simple pattern of people getting obsidian from one source and then shifting to the next. "Our analysis shows that they were acquiring obsidian from an increasing number of geological sources over time, a trend that was impossible to detect with the technology and methods available 50 years ago."
Frahm said that the new analysis shows that there were more settlements between the source volcanoes and the two sites where the artifacts were unearthed.
The artifacts were collected in the 1960's by Frank Hole, the C.J. MacCurdy Professor of Anthropology at Yale. The artifacts' appearance was the main factor in the initial analyses. The artifacts were subjected to an analysis method that involved grinding them into powder.
Frahm and Carolus are the first to study the composition of obsidian artifacts since they were first analyzed. State-of-the-art portable X-ray fluorescence instruments allowed them to examine the entire collection without damaging it.
Carolus said that every aspect of the discoveries had been reexamined since the 1960s. There is more information about the source volcanoes today than there was 50 years ago. In a matter of seconds, we have instruments the size of drills that give us a more accurate signature than we've ever had before.
Increased food supplies and permanent settlements allowed for rapid population growth during the transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to agriculture, according to scientists. Finding evidence of this demographic shift often requires excavating locations that include burial sites, which can indicate a given settlement's population and give a clearer picture of how agriculture allowed people to dispersal across a landscape.
Similar evidence was provided by the obsidian analysis.
"Tracing the obsidian artifacts from their sources to their endpoints gives us insight into how they moved from hand to hand over time, which helps us understand population changes in the region during the Neolithic Era," Frahm said. There were more settlements between the source volcanoes and the excavation sites than we thought.
More information: Ellery Frahm et al, Identifying the origins of obsidian artifacts in the Deh Luran Plain (Southwestern Iran) highlights community connections in the Neolithic Zagros, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2109321119 Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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