ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how the Neolithic period in Iran was a time of significant change in human relationships with the natural world, a reformulation and intensification of human engagement with plants, animals and the broader environment, creating the farming and herding basis of subsequent societies in the region. For north-central Iran the term “Transitional Chalcolithic” has been given to a long timespan, approximately a millennium, bridging the Neolithic to the Chalcolithic. Cereals were cultivated in many settlements of the central Iranian plateau using irrigation systems, and an irrigation canal of the Transitional Chalcolithic period has been excavated at Tepe Pardis on the Tehran plain. Hole and Flannery associate the extensive use of irrigation and of recently domesticated cattle as key components in the emergence of social complexity during this period on the Deh Luran plain. The evidence for ceramic production from the plains of north-central Iran during the period 5200–4200 BC indicates similar developments there.
