Middle Paleolithic

There has been more than four decades since Frank Hole and Kent Flannery conducted a field expedition in central Zagros Mountains located in western Iran, in 1963. From then onward, numerous discoveries and field projects have been done in this region. Some of these findings may contradict the report of the original survey. Although the goal of this article by no means, is to criticize the 1967 report, it sounds unavoidable to incorporate the new discoveries in it. For instance, the author of this article believes that the twelve missing sites in the 1963 survey were found later, hence; new discoveries in case of the presence of Levallois technique in the Zagros Mountains could change our understanding regarding the Middle Paleolithic of Zagros.

As a key archaeological site, Kaldar Cave provides evidence of the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition in Iran. It is also one of the earliest sites with cultural materials attributed to early AMHs in western Asia. Apart from the earlier obtained dates from its Upper Paleolithic sequence, we provide here the recent obtained Thermoluminescence date from the layer 5. In this paper, we elaborate and corelate this dating to a broader discussion within the Zagros Middle and Upper Paleolithic sites. In this study, we also present a brief information on the freshly recovered lithic industries, Paleontological data, the obtained T.L dating and its position in the stratigraphic sequence