Animal husbandry and food provisioning at the Kura-Araxes settlement of Köhne Shahar in Northwestern Iran

The spatial organization of craft production at the Kura-Araxes settlement of Köhne Shahar in northwestern Iran: A zooarchaeological approach

“…The small size of most sites, low occupation intensity, and the presence of sites in rugged and seasonally inhospitable highlands, have been central to the description of many KA sites as temporary camps of mobile herders or small sedentary agropastoral communities [9,[21][22][23]. These communities are often described as socially undifferentiated and egalitarian societies focused on subsistence farming and herding economies [18,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29], because they lack evidence of specialized division of labor, centralized institutions, and social stratification typical of contemporaneous Mesopotamian cities or subsequent mountain societies of the second and first millennia BCE. These animal and farming economies were complemented with craft production and industrial activities.…”

“…Zooarchaeology remains in large part the study of human subsistence practices in the past. Standard zooarchaeological measures, such as relative taxonomic abundance, can reliably reconstruct hunting and herding practices [25,38], while the application of animal body part representations and bone surface modifications to spatial analyses are used to reconstruct food provisioning and distribution mechanisms [25,[39][40][41][42][43][44]. As we will demonstrate at KSH and as has been shown elsewhere [41], these same zooarchaeological measures are also versatile tools for understanding how people engaging in manufacturing activities organized their work space, what body parts of which animals they selected for tool making, how they stored and accessed their faunal raw material, where they made and used their bone tools, and ultimately where they discarded their waste.…”

“…At the moment it is unclear whether plant or animal fabric was spun in these workshops. However, elsewhere we have shown that a proportion of the sheep and goats herded at KSH were kept into adulthood, providing residents with access to wool and hair [16,25].…”

“…Lack of a top-down system to control access to raw materials is not surprising insofar as faunal remains are concerned. The long bones of sheep and goat were not precious or valuable materials and would have been easily accessible thanks to the site's well-developed animal husbandry practices [16,25]. Ease of access explains the widespread distribution of worked and unworked long bones throughout the excavated areas.…”

“…Antler was also easily accessible. Deer body part representation shows that KSH residents actively hunted large deer but also collected shed antler whenever possible [25].…”