Ali Kosh

Ali Kosh is a low mound on the Deh Luran plain in the south of Ilam province, near the border with Iraq and the hot lowlands of Khuzestan. It rises only a few metres above the surrounding fields, but beneath it lie the remains of one of the earliest farming villages known in Iran, where people first began to herd animals and grow crops.

The mound was excavated in 1961 and 1963 by the American archaeologists Frank Hole and Kent Flannery, working with James Neely, as part of a study of how farming began in the Zagros foothills. Their report, published in 1969, became a classic of the field. They traced a sequence of small villages of mud-brick houses, beginning around the eighth millennium BCE, whose people herded goats and sheep and grew early forms of wheat and barley, while still hunting and gathering wild plants.

Ali Kosh showed that the lowland plains at the foot of the Zagros, not only the mountain valleys, had been part of the story of early farming. Iranian archaeologists have since returned to the site to re-examine its layers with modern dating methods. At the time of the first excavations the area was administered from Khuzestan, which is why older books place Ali Kosh there.

There is little to see on the surface today, but the site is a reminder that the plains of Ilam were home to some of the earliest farming communities in Iran. Finds from the excavations, from stone tools to the remains of seeds and animal bones, allowed archaeologists to follow, layer by layer, how a community of hunters slowly became one of farmers and herders.