ESTABLISHING AN ABSOLUTE CHRONOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE LATE CHALCOLITHIC TO EARLY BRONZE AGE IN IRAQI KURDISTAN: RADIOCARBON DATES FROM KANI SHAIE


 The possibility to conduct new fieldwork projects in previously largely unexplored Iraqi Kurdistan during the past decade has reinvigorated research into the transformative fifth to third millennium BCE (Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age) in southwest Asia when human societies grew from small, autonomous villages to centralized states with urban centers. Major efforts to synchronize stratigraphic sequences from various sites in order to reach a consensus on archaeological periodization and to identify the absolute chronology of societal transformations necessarily focused on available datasets from Syria, Turkey, and Iran. However, increased understanding of differences in communities’ adoption, adaptation, or rejection of new forms of technologies and social organization demands the need for constructing region-specific absolute chronological models for comparative analysis. Such work is particularly challenging in the case of Iraqi Kurdistan where sites frequently have major hiatuses in occupation. The site of Kani Shaie (Sulaymaniyah Governorate) offers the rare opportunity to investigate the Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age with a largely uninterrupted sequence of occupation from ca. 5500 to 2500 BCE. This paper presents a series of fourteen radiocarbon dates, representing every archaeological period in this timeframe, as a first step toward the construction of a regional absolute chronology.