Excavations at Shaikh Marif, Iraqi Kurdistan: Preliminary Report of the First Season (2022) (original) (raw)

2023, Ancient Civilizations and Cultural Resources

The Shahrizor Plain is in a mountainous basin in the eastern part of the Sulaymaniyah Governorate, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, where evidence of prehistoric occupations has been increasingly accumulated by recent investigations. Regarding the chronology of its late prehistory, however, there are some ill-defined archaeological gaps yet to be filled, the most critical of which lies in the early 6th millennium cal. BC. To address this issue, new excavations began at Shaikh Marif in 2022, following investigations at Shakar Tepe in 2019. Our work in 2022 successfully uncovered cultural deposits that yielded artefact assemblages typical of the Late Neolithic period. The dates of the site were estimated to be approximately 6000 cal. BC and thus fill a part of the chronological gaps in the archaeological records of the late prehistory in this region.