Kani Shaie: An Early Bronze Age Center in the Bazyan Valley, Sulaimaniya

At the 2014 ASOR Annual Meeting, Steve Renette presented the paper, “Kani Shaie: An Early Bronze Age Center in the Bazyan Valley, Sulaymaniyah,” during the Archaeology of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq III session. The session focuses on recent excavations being conducted in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. While attending the meeting, he volunteered to reread the paper for ASORtv. Below is his presentation, and the abstract from the paper.

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Abstract from the 2014 Annual Meeting Program book.

Steve Renette (University of Pennsylvania), Ricardo Cabral (University of Coimbra), and André Tomé (University of Coimbra), “Kani Shaie: An Early Bronze Age Center in the Bazyan Valley, Sulaymaniyah”

Kani Shaie is a small site in the Bazyan Valley, on the road between Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah. Despite its small size, it is one of the most conspicuous sites in the valley, located at its center and close to various streams and springs. A first visit to the site in March 2012 suggested a long occupation throughout the Bronze Age and in Parthian and early Islamic times, offering the opportunity quickly to establish a stratigraphic sequence of material culture in this archaeologically poorly understood region. During the first season of fieldwork in September 2013, excavations confirmed the enormous potential of Kani Shaie. The site was occupied primarily during the Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age. Kani Shaie is the first excavated site in Iraqi Kurdistan with a significant occupation during the end of the fourth and the beginning of the third millennium BCE, a period that so far has proven very difficult to detect in surveys in the central western Zagros region. Evidence for this period at Kani Shaie comes from a wide variety of painted pottery styles, several of which are either completely unknown or very poorly understood, and seal impressions. During the Late Chalcolithic period the site was probably a local administrative center, as evidenced by southern Mesopotamian Uruk-style pottery, large-scale architecture, and the discovery of a seal-impressed numerical tablet. Further excavations at Kani Shaie will explore these occupation levels in more detail and examine the Parthian and early Islamic settlement at the foot of the tell.

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