A New Radiocarbon Chronology for the Late Neolithic to Iron Age in the Qazvin Plain, Iran

Archaeological excavations on the western part of the Central Iranian Plateau, known as the Qazvin Plain provides invaluable information about the sedentary communities from early occupation to the later prehistoric era. Despite the past archeological data, chronological studies mostly rely on the relative use of the Bayesian modeling for stratigraphically-related radiocarbon dates. The current paper provides a new model for excavations and the chronological framework based on new radiocarbon dating of the six key archeological enclosures in the Qazvin plain. A Bayesian analysis of these data is presented on a site-by-site basis to give the best chronologies. Finally, all dates are combined into a single model of the chronology of the Qazvin Plain from the Late Neolithic to the Iron Age. The procedure aims to use the Bayesian model to predict the transition points between the archaeologically-defined periods with the highest possible precision, to redefine the existing chronology for the Qazvin Plain.