Discovery of new open-air Paleolithic localities in Central Alborz, Northern Iran.
The cooperative French-Iranian Paleoanthropological Project (FIPP) discovered three Paleolithic localities in Central Alborz, Northern Iran during its 2005 field mission. In the northern foothills near Baliran in Mazandârân province, Garm Roud yielded an open-air site with an archaeological layer attributable to the last glacial period that dates from the end of OIS 3 (28,486+/-190 cal BP). These geochronological data and the typo-technical observations converge to place the Garm Roud 2 assemblage in the Upper Paleolithic. Garm Roud 2 is thus the first site of this kind discovered in the area. In the southern foothills near Damâvand in Tehran province, Moghanak and Otchounak represent two open-air surface localities with lithic assemblages of Mousterian to Ante-Mousterian affinity. Garm Roud, Moghanak, and Otchounak provide some of the first direct field evidence of early human settlements in this central area of the Middle East.
Berillon
Gilles
G
UPR 2147 CNRS, Dynamique de l'Evolution Humaine, 44 rue de l'Amiral Mouchez, Paris 75014, France. berillon@ivry.cnrs.fr <berillon@ivry.cnrs.fr>
Asgari Khaneghah
Asghar
A
Antoine
Pierre
P
Bahain
Jean-Jacques
JJ
Chevrier
Benoît
B
Zeitoun
Valéry
V
Aminzadeh
Narges
N
Beheshti
Mohammad
M
Chanzanagh
Hamid Ebadollahi
HE
Nochadi
Sara
S
D001106:Archaeology; D005843:Geography; D006801:Humans; D007492:Iran