Hanna Sosnowska (UCL) - 2014-15 Students
h.sosnowska.11@ucl.ac.uk

The socio-economic implications of lithic technologies in the Late Prehistory of Iraqi Kurdistan

The area of the Middle East witnessed unprecedented changes of fundamental importance to the human societies on the economic, technological and social grounds. The period in question, spanning the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (8000 BC) to the Early Bronze Age (3100 BC) is marked by the development and establishment of agriculture and herding economies, sedentary mode of life, leading to the subsequent emergence of villages and, in the further perspective, first urban centres, intensification in the flow of goods, growing social complexity and important transformations in social organisation. My research aims to investigate to what degree these changes are directly detectable in the stone tool (‘lithic’) assemblages and technology employed in present Iraqi Kurdistan. It forms part of two larger, multidisciplinary projects run by UCL: Shahrizor Prehistory Project (with Prof. David Wengrow) and Jarmo Project (with Prof. Dorian Fuller), and adopts several methodological approaches, deriving from experimental archaeology and archaeometry.