Archaeological Investigations of Kuran Buzan Valley in Central Zagros

The Kuran Buzan valley is a long and narrow valley located in Central Zagros mountainous region comprising the eastern parts of modern Luristan as well as the north eastern parts of Ilam provinces. The environment of valley and the flow of Seymareh River in the center of valley have given potentially the valley an ideal space attracting the human colonies from the very early times through nowadays. Locating the real sequences of human occupations and their distributions across the valley، a systematic archaeological survey of the area have conducted in spring 2010. Since the dam construction in the area seemed to have threatened the archaeological sites and also because of the topography of the valley which would obscured the sites appearances، a full coverage and intensive gridded system of survey was applied to enhance the probability of finding not only the actual locations of sites but rather off-site material which were assumed to be distributed all around the valley. Applying such technique in an area about 71 km2، we were able to explore some 110 Paleolithic sites as well as some sites from the various cultural periods (2 sites as Neolithic، 1 site as Chalcolithic; 2 sites as Bronze Age، 7 sites belong to the historical period and 7 to the Islamic era). These، are including Paleolithic open sites، Neolithic open sites، Chalcolithic and Bronze Age settlement، 1 historical fortress، some historic sites with distribution of pottery، a watermill، a channel and a cemetery from Islamic period. Sites could be attributed to the Lower (3 sites) and Middle Paleolithic (107 sites) while we could not identified the Upper Paleolithic/Epi-paleolithic episodes yet. This could be attributed to the geophysical patterns of the area where many natural cherty outcrops (Amirn formation) and some other raw material are easy to access on the surface made it possible the Paleolithic stone tool makers were able to use. The assemblages are consisted of Acheulian bifacial as well as large chopping tools، cores، scrapers and other Lower Paleolithic tool types as well as including a variety of the Middle Paleolithic industry such as large tools were generally made by the Levallois techniques. Considering the spatial pattern of sites and studying the distribution frequency of tools and their technological characteristics may applied that the Kuran Buzan valley attracted the different groups of Pleistocene’s hunter-gatherer; as the availability of resources could reinforced the living struggles of populations. During the later periods which plant cultivations become dominant، the only way of life in the region، the shortage of accessible lands which were restricted just to the patchy alluvial terraces of the Seymareh River banks prevented the valley being occupied by the farmer societies. Through this research we found that the geographical location of Kuran Buzan valley which is linked to the known Paleolithic areas in the north to Kermanshah، Mahidasht and Sarfirouzabad as well as to Hulailan in the west and to Kuhdasht in the east may account for existence of a networking system through which the Kuran Buzan tool makers were interacted technologically with their peripheral neighbors.