THE KARIM SHAHIR ASSEMBLAGE
Karim Shahir differs from the Natufian sites in that it shows traces of a temporary open site or encampment. It lies on the top of a bluff in the Kurdish hill-country of northeastern Iraq. It was dug by Dr. Bruce Howe of the expedition I directed in 1950–51 for the Oriental Institute and the American Schools of Oriental Research. In 1954–55, our expedition located another site, M’lefaat, with general resemblance to Karim Shahir, but about a hundred miles north of it. In 1956, Dr. Ralph Solecki located still another Karim Shahir type of site called Zawi Chemi Shanidar. The Zawi Chemi site has a radiocarbon date of 8900 ± 300 B.C.
Karim Shahir has evidence of only one very shallow level of occupation. It was probably not lived on very long, although the people who lived on it spread out over about three acres of area. In spots, the single layer yielded great numbers of fist-sized cracked pieces of limestone, which had been carried up from the bed of a stream at the bottom of the bluff. We think these cracked stones had something to do with a kind of architecture, but we were unable to find positive traces of hut plans. At M’lefaat and Zawi Chemi, there were traces of rounded hut plans.
As in the Natufian, the great bulk of small objects of the Karim Shahir assemblage was in chipped flint. A large proportion of the flint tools were microlithic bladelets and geometric forms. The flint sickle blade was almost non-existent, being far scarcer than in the Natufian. The people of Karim Shahir did a modest amount of work in the grinding of stone; there were milling stone fragments of both the mortar and the quern type, and stone hoes or axes with polished bits. Beads, pendants, rings, and bracelets were made of finer quality stone. We found a few simple points and needles of bone, and even two rather formless unbaked clay figurines which seemed to be of animal form.
SKETCH OF KARIM SHAHIR ASSEMBLAGE
CHIPPED STONE
GROUND STONE
UNBAKED CLAY
SHELL
BONE
“ARCHITECTURE”
Karim Shahir did not yield direct evidence of the kind of vegetable food its people ate. The animal bones showed a considerable increase in the proportion of the bones of the species capable of domestication—sheep, goat, cattle, horse, dog—as compared with animal bones from the earlier cave sites of the area, which have a high proportion of bones of wild forms like deer and gazelle. But we do not know that any of the Karim Shahir animals were actually domesticated. Some of them may have been, in an “incipient” way, but we have no means at the moment that will tell us from the bones alone.