Project description
Timing the emergence of dairy pastoralism in the Zagros mountains
Eleven thousand years ago, the Zagros mountains (Iran) witnessed the development of agro-pastoralism and residential mobility. Meat and milk exploitation played an important role in culinary practices of ancient human communities. The use of dairy products by early pastoralists is not fully understood, due to lacking direct proof of milk consumption and when and how it started. The EU-funded VARGAH project will fill these gaps through palaeodietary reconstruction, using ancient proteins and lipids preserved in human dental tartar and pottery vessels. It will determine chronology using the radiocarbon method on bone collagen and lipid residues preserved in ceramics. VARGAH will provide robust answers on early mobile and sedentary pastoralism in a region central to our understanding of agricultural development.
Objective
The development of agriculture and the domestication of animals has influenced past human diet up to the modern food industry. Archaeology contributes to enriching our knowledge of past societies, including the exploitation of natural resources by human groups and adaptation to various environments. Human societies associated with the beginnings of agriculture and domestication began in the Neolithic. Recent bioarchaeological studies have highlighted the role of the Zagros mountains (Iran) in the dynamics of plant and animal domestication in the Near East and their spread eastwards. This region has also witnessed the development of nomadic pastoralism throughout its history. Nonetheless, the overall subsistence strategy and beginnings of milk exploitation by these early pastoralists are not yet understood, due to the lack of analysis of absorbed food residue from pottery and difficulties in dating the mobile camps in this area.
VARGAH (“mobile camps” in Persian) aims to fill the gaps in our understanding of the development of agriculture and animal management in Iranian archaeology by (1) paleodietary reconstruction, using ancient proteins preserved in human dental calculus and lipid residues preserved in pottery vessels, (2) resolving the chronology using bone collagen dating and compound-specific radiocarbon dating of lipid residues and (3) contextualisation of pastoralism through the comparison of sedentary and mobile groups. This project is based on a synergy between advances in analytical chemistry applied to archaeometry (fellow), cutting-edge expertise in Iranian archaeology and biomolecular geochemistry (host), and advances in 14C geochronology measurements (secondment). VARGAH will provide robust answers on early pastoralism in a region central to our understanding for agricultural development. The project will also enable the fellow to reach an idependant leading position by developping sought-after expertise linking archaeology, chemistry and geosciences.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural scienceschemical sciencesanalytical chemistry
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistory
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculeslipids
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyarchaeologyarchaeometry
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculture
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
75005 Paris
France