A 1st Millennium BCE Burial-Deprived Ritual Practice: New Evidences from Shahliq Kurgan, Northwestern Iran

Until now, the well-known Kurgans in northwestern Iran were associated with burial mounds containing burial pits; however, discoveries in 2018 revealed mounds lacking human burials indicating still unknown rituals and ceremonies. Shahliq Kurgan, 178 km northeast of Tabriz, is one of such Kurgans. Before the construction of Peygham-Chay Dam by East Azerbaijan Regional Water Authority, the survey and identification of archaeological sites at the dam site was done in 2014 in order to save the historical-cultural monuments at risk of being submerged. The first season of rescue excavation began in 2018. The architecture of the mound, abundant stone tools, sacrificial offerings as well as ash deposits, indicate that the mound had been a place for some special rituals and ceremonies during the early first millennium BCE. The ash material recovered from the site suggested the tradition of cremation, a hypothesis rejected in later anthropological experiments. It may also be one of the first sites where fire was set in an open space for ritual purposes, since the large volume of ash could be evidence for this idea. The evidences for ecological sequence obtained from deposits underneath a stone structure indicate that during the period of establishment of human settlements in Bronze Age, metal extraction and smelting and extensive use of forest resources caused the vegetation to turn from dense forests into scattered shrubs. The present study is based on field excavations as well as library resources to study the function of burial-deprived kurgans following a descriptive analytic approach.