Agriculture in the Zagros

The Zagros Mountains are the largest mountain range in Iraq and Iran.  With the total length of 932 miles, from the northwestern Iran and approximately correlating with western border of Iran, the Zagros mountain range spans the complete length of the southwestern and western Iranian plateau and ends at Straits of Hormuz.

Until 1986, based on the excavations of Philip Smith at Ganj Dareh, it was thought that the Iranian Zagros had also been an autonomous and precocious centre of neolithisation, contemporary with the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Levant. But the radiocarbon dates have been revised and this has reduced the age of the sequence (Hole 1987; Stordeur 1994). Its rectangular architecture in any case has much closer affinities with the much later PPNB of the Levant than with the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. Agriculture in the eastern Zagros is therefore not earlier than the eighth millennium BC. Was it locally developed or derived from that of the Levant? That is another matter; but it is clear that it is later than that of the Levant. The western Zagros (Iraqi Kurdistan) has for its part produced settlements like Karim Shahir or M'lcfaat, con­temporary with the Levantine PPNA, but no trace of subsistence production has yet been identified there (Howe 1983), and the first farming villages of Kurdistan, such as Jarmo, are also of the eighth millennium BC. More recently, new excavations at Qermez Derc (Watkins et ai 1990) and Nemrik (Kozlowski 1990a, 1990b), villages situated in the Sinjar hills and the Tigris valley respectively, at the foot of the western Zagros mountains, have brought us evidence of an independent cultural tradition that runs in chronological par­allel, from 12,000 BC, with the Natufian, the Khiamian and the PPNA and PPNB cul­tures of the Levant, but lacking cultivation before 8000 BC, in spite of a sedentary life and highly elaborated circular buildings from its beginning 8000 BP, or 6000 be according to the traditional chronology, which corresponds to about 6900 BC.

Questionnaire:

• Explain about the agriculture in the Zagros.