Main conjectures for higher rank nearly ordinary families – I.

In this article, we present the first half of our project on the Iwasawa theory of higher rank Galois deformations over deformations rings of arbitrary dimension. We develop a theory of Coleman maps for a very general class of coefficient rings, devise a dimension reduction procedure for locally restricted Euler systems and finally, put these into use in order to prove a divisibility in a 3-variable main conjecture for nearly ordinary families of Rankin-Selberg convolutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]