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This paper presents an inscribed bronze necklet discovered at Yasin Tepe, one of the largest tell-type sites in the Sulaymaniyah Governorate in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. The necklet was found on the floor of a large building complex of the Neo-Assyrian period that probably belonged to an elite family living at the site. The two-line inscription dates to around the eighth to seventh centuries BCE, and mentions the dedication of a son by his father to the god Nabû, implying the diffusion of his worship to the frontier of the Assyrian empire. Nishiyama wrote Sections 1–4, and Yamada Section 5, respectively; both share the responsibility for Section 6. Abbreviations follow M. P. Streck et al. (eds.), Reallexikon der Assyriologie, vol. 15. Berlin/Boston, except for RINAP 2 = Frame 2020; RIMA 2 = Grayson 1991, RIMA 3 = Grayson 1996. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A wave of new fieldwork in Iraqi Kurdistan during the past decade offers the opportunity to study societies of the Islamic periods from an archaeological perspective. Unfortunately, our current understanding of ceramic typology and chronology in the region still hinges overwhelmingly on datasets from major urban centers and the long-standing analysis of the technological development of glazed wares. The material culture of rural communities, on the other hand, is poorly understood. This causes problems for the reconstruction of the social and economic history of Islamic-era societies, and for survey projects that aim to assess longue durée changes in settlement patterns based on chronological assessments of surface collections. This article presents a coherent corpus of Middle Islamic pottery retrieved from a series of large pits from the site of Kani Shaie in Sulaymaniyah Governorate, Iraqi Kurdistan. Given the small size of the site, the lack of contemporary settlement remains, and the nature of the ceramic assemblage, it is proposed that these pits were used to dump refuse by a small nomadic community or household that returned to the site for a number of years in the 11th–13th century c.e. This small dataset offers glimpses into the lifeways of people who inhabited the border zone between the urbanized lowlands of Mesopotamia and the Zagros Highlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Kani Shaie is a small archaeological site in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, centrally located in the Bazian Basin, a narrow valley at the western edge of the Zagros Mountains along the major route between Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah. Its main mound was inhabited almost continuously from the fifth to the middle of the third millennium, c. 5000–2500 B.C.E. This period of Mesopotamian prehistory, corresponding to the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age, witnessed major transformations such as initial urbanism and intensification of interregional interaction networks. The recent resurgence of fieldwork in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq is beginning to reveal local trajectories that do not always match the established chronological framework, which is largely based on changes in ceramic technology and styles observed in northern Mesopotamia. Here, we discuss the ceramic sequence retrieved from a step trench at Kani Shaie spanning the entire Late Chalcolithic (c. 4600–3100 B.C.E.). A bottom-up approach to potting traditions at the site allows an initial assessment of the relationship between local communities in the Zagros foothills and large-scale developments in the Mesopotamian world. We argue that the evidence from Kani Shaie reflects a long process in which different communities of practice made active choices of adopting, adapting, or rejecting non-local cultural practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]