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The works collected in this volume are a selection of papers that were originally presented at the Revisiting the Hilly Flanks: the Epipalaeolithic and Neolithic periods in the eastern Fertile Crescent conference held at the University of Copenhagen from 21 to 25 June 2021. The conference was planned to be one of the end results of the Tracking Cultural and Environmental Change (TCEC): the Epipalaeolithic and Neolithic in the Seimarreh Valley project, directed by Hojjat Darabi, Tobias Richter and Peder Mortensen, and generously funded by the C.L. David Foundation and Collection. While the conference was originally planned as a large gathering of scholars in Copenhagen, the travel restrictions imposed to limit the spread of COVID-19 forced us to hold the conference as an online event. The more than 50 papers presented at the conference showcased the wide range of research carried out on the Epipalaeolithic and Neolithic in the eastern wing of the Fertile Crescent - Braidwood’s Hilly Flanks - and highlighted that this region played an important and integral role in the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture in Southwest Asia.

The ‘hilly flanks’ of the Zagros in the eastern Fertile Crescent (EFC) were the first area explicitly targeted for investigating the emergence of agriculture and sedentary life starting in the late 1940s. The subsequent concentration of research on the Levant and Anatolia suggested that early Neolithic innovations initially emerged in the western and central areas of the Fertile Crescent. However, renewed work in the central Zagros has once again highlighted this region as a key region in a wider cultural mosaic that witnessed local developments of the neolithisation process. To provide new impetus for investigating the transition from the Late Pleistocene to the Early Holocene in the EFC, we summarise here the results of the joint Iranian-Danish Tracking Cultural and Environmental Change project, as part of which the Neolithic sites of Asiab and Ganj Dareh and the Epipaleolithic cave site of Mar Gurgalan were re-excavated using current methods and techniques. Although both Asiab and Ganj Dareh were previously excavated quite intensively, the lack of publications on both sites and advances in archaeological methods since their initial investigation left many questions unanswered. In addition, the excavation of Mar Gurgalan provided an opportunity to investigate the Epipaleolithic period of the central Zagros in greater detail. In addition to summarising the results of our work at these sites, we will therefore also contextualise them before the background of broader debates concerning the emergence of Neolithic societies in Southwest Asia.

This volume brings together the latest results and discussions from research carried out in the eastern Fertile Crescent, the so-called hilly flanks, and adjacent regions, as well as providing key historical perspectives on earlier fieldwork in the region. The emergence of sedentary food producing societies in southwest Asia ca. 10,000 years ago has been a key research focus for archaeologists since the 1930s. This book provides a balance to the weight of work undertaken in the western Fertile Crescent, namely the Levant and southern Anatolia. This preference has led to a heavy emphasis on these regions in discussions about where, when and how the transition from hunting and gathering to plant cultivation and animal domestication occurred. Chapters assess the role of the eastern Fertile Crescent as a key region in the Neolithization process in southwest Asia, highlighting the key and important contributions people in this region made to the emergence of sedentary farming societies. This book is primarily aimed at academics researching the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture in southwest Asia. It will also be of interest to archaeologists working on this transition in other parts of Eurasia.

Short report on a conference held at the University of Copenhagen, June 2021.

Communal buildings have been reported from a number of early Neolithic sites from the Levant and Anatolia, but none were known from the central Zagros. Here we report on the recent excavations at Asiab, Kermanshah province, Iran, and argue that the principle feature found during Robert Braidwood’s excavation at the site in 1960 should be interpreted as an example of a communal building. We discuss the results of the previous and recent excavations, highlight the key features of this building, and the implications for our understanding of the early Neolithic in the ‘eastern wing’ of the Fertile Crescent.