Without Head Human Figurines in two Snag-e Chakhmagh and Zaghe Collections

One of the characteristic of Neolithic material of Near Eastern archaeology is the human and animal clay figurines. Due to the fragility of unfired clay, many of the discovered figurines where broken and in many cases it was the neck or the head of the figurines which were broken. This was considered as if the breakage has been done porously. In few regions such as Levant, some figurines were discovered which had hole in their neck. The hole shows if the head of the figurine was removable or replaceable. Until now no report shows the presence of this type of figurine in Iran. A revise of two collection of Sang-e Chakhamagh and Zaghe figurines of Iran, respectively belong to Neolithic and transitional Chalcolithic, shows if this types of figurines are existing in Iran’s figurines collections. With research on the two mentioned collections, this paper fallow two aims; The first aim is to add the Iran’s samples to the geographical distributional of removable head figurines and the second aim is to interpret this types of figurines in Sang-e Chakhmagh and Zaghe collections. The data of this research has been gathered through museum survey and also library research. The data was analyzed qualitatively. The main question which this paper is built on is: how the head and face were represented in Sang-e Chakhamgh and Zaghe’s human figurine collctions? This research could be classified as Historic-cultural researches. This research shows that the geographical distribution of removable head figurines was not limited to Levant and covered wider regions that has been thought. The result shows that omitting the face of figurines may show that the producers refused to refer a specific person. Also, the possibility of removing head may have brought the possibility to change the identity, gender or the age of the figurine.