Dinkha Tepe Revisited

Presentation Date: 

Saturday, November 22, 2014

Location: 

Annual Meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research, San Diego

Abstract: Dinkha Tepe is a major archaeological site in the Ushnu plain of northwestern Iran. Excavations in the 1960s by the University of Pennsylvania’s Hasanlu Project revealed a long occupation sequence, which extended from the second millennium BCE to the present. Although Dinkha has figured prominently in some of the most important debates in Iranian archaeology, the bulk of the excavated material has never been published, and until recently the excavation dataset had only been analyzed in piecemeal fashion. This paper presents the results of a new and holistic evaluation of the site and its excavated evidence, centered around a comprehensive stratigraphic analysis that serves as the basis for broader interpretation. The results show how the original work at Dinkha, and the conclusions subsequently drawn from it, were built on questionable theoretical and methodological foundations. A new archaeological sequence for the site is proposed, and Dinkha’s importance in the history of the region is reassessed. A historical identification of Dinkha Tepe with the city of Kunšum is proposed, suggesting the site was a regional power center during the early second millennium BCE. Furthermore, the study shows that the radical discontinuity in material culture, previously thought to mark the transition from “Bronze Age” to “Iron Age”, does not in fact exist. Rather, oversimplification of the stratigraphic sequence, compounded by poor definition of ceramic wares, led to the failure to identify what is here shown to be a continuing process of graded change. Part of a session entitled "New Approaches to the Archaeology of Hasanlu, Iran", at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research.