An Archaeological Study on Accounting System in Prehistoric Human Societies of the Qazvin Plain: the Case of Tepe Zagheh

The study of the circumstances surrounding the development of record-keeping for information purposes, and of what these records looked like, in prehistoric human societies has always played a significant role in archaeological research. Such research is important because it relates to the beginnings of the use of accounting and reckoning systems, which came to be one of the principal elements of institutionalized management and bureaucracies under during the urbanized historical periods. Tepe Zagheh is one of the key sites of the transitional period from Neolithic to Chalcolithic in the Qazvin Plain, having provided a considerable collection of tokens (counting objects) in addition to the various other pieces of cultural evidence that were discovered through the successive excavations projects. Thus 238 Zagheh tokens were available for typological study and theoretical analysis. The main goal of this paper is to re-identify accounting and reckoning systems applied in Tepe Zagheh and to study the evolutionary processes of accounting systems in this prehistoric site. It is apparent from the study that the Zagheh society experienced an early form of accounting system for keeping track of farm products and of animal counts, and that tokens were the tools used to document such reckoning processes.