Excavations at Chogha Bonut

Oriental Institute "" Excavations at Chogha Bonut: The Earliest Vilage in Susiana, Iran. By Abbas Alizadeh, Research Associate. The Oriental Institute and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. The University of Chicago. The political upheavals in Iran in 1978/79 interrupted the process of momentous discoveries of the beginning of village life in lowland Susiana. The Oriental Institute excavations at Chogha Mish (recently published by the Oriental Institute Publications Office) not only provided a long uninterrupted sequence of prehistoric Susiana, but also yielded evidence of cultures much earlier than what had been previously known, pushing back the date of human occupation on the plain for at least one millennium. The work of Helene Kantor and Pinhas Delougaz at Chogha Mish, the largest early fifth-millennium site, added the Archaic period to the already well-established Susiana prehistoric sequence. The sophistication of the artifacts and architecture of even the earliest phase of the Archaic period showed that there must have been a stage of cultural development antecedent to the successful adaptation of village life in southwestern Iran, but surveys and excavations had failed to reveal such a phase in that region.