Revisiting the archaeological stratigraphy of Hotu cave, Iran: preliminary report of the 2021 excavation

The Mesolithic period and its transition to the Neolithic period in Western Asia is one of the most important stages of human cultural evolution during which. humans gradually changed their way of life and cultural behavior. After millennia of living as mobile hunter-gatherers, these changes in human lifestyle were so significant that some scientists consider them to have triggered the Anthropocene (Smith and Zeder, 2013). Therefore, the study of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer way of life and its transformation into a Neolithic society is crucial for investigating the first steps and possible triggers of this fundamental change. A small number of important archaeological sites in the southeastern edge of the Caspian Sea coast provide rich sequences of hunter-gatherers dating from about 15,000 to 10,000 years ago with abundant cultural materials. One of those, Hotu Cave located nearby the modern Iranian city Behshahr, was firstly described by the American anthropologist Carlton Coon in 1949 and then excavated by him in 1951. Due to various reasons, a proper report on this cave was never presented. Our new activities at the site after 70 years aim to establish a secure chronology from the Mesolithic to the Parthian period and to link obvious gaps in the cave sequence to climatic and environmental changes during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene. The new excavation at Hotu Cave is not only useful to contextualize the data from the Coon excavations, but has also helped us to generate additional data to propose a regional chronology from the Mesolithic onwards. In this paper we present not only the current data on the chronology of the cave, but also all the chronological schemes attempted by scholars, which we have brought together. Our project not only includes activities in Hotu Cave, but also carried out excavations in 2022 and 2023 at the two other key sites of the relevant Mesolithic-Neolithic transitional horizon, Kamarband Cave and Komishani Tappe, which lies in front of Komishani Cave. The material culture from the recent excavations is very important in proposing a new model of the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic for the Iranian highlands that goes beyond the Zagros region, which – until now – has been considered an independent core region of early domestication and Neolithization.