ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to establish a chronology for the Iron Age in Guilan by using the results obtained by the Japanese explorations, and to try to place Marlik, Kaluraz, Tomadjan, and other sites from Guilan and West-Mazanderan within this framework. The chronology proposed is truly needed, as for too long now many different dates have been proposed for single objects. The province of Guilan, which is situated at the south-western corner of the Caspian Sea, has been explored by several Iranian and Japanese archaeological expeditions in the last twenty-five years. A perusal of publications available at present leads inevitably to the astonishing observation that the Guilan material is nearly completely neglected in theories on population migrations in the 2nd millennium BC; yet this may well be due to the lack of any available chronological framework.
