
Marjan MashkourFrench National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS · Institut écologie et environnement (INEE)
Marjan Mashkour
Directrice de Recherche (DR2) - CNRS
About
390
Publications
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Introduction
Marjan Mashkour currently works at the Institut écologie et environnement (INEE) , French National Centre for Scientific Research. Marjan does research in Archaeology, Biological Anthropology and Cultural Anthropology. Her current project is on the site of Ghazanchi (Kermanshah) Iran, A multiperiod site from early Neolithic to the Bronze Age.
Additional affiliations
January 2009 - August 2016
October 2004 - present
October 2004 - August 2016
Publications
Publications (390)
Wezmeh Cave is located on the northeastern edge of the Islamabad plain, a high intermontane valley in the western-central Zagros. In 1999 a disturbed but large faunal assemblage was recovered from this site. The abundant and extremely diverse faunal spectra present at Wezmeh Cave has highlighted the importance of this assemblage. Carnivore remains...
Recent archaeological discoveries in the Halil Rud valley in the Kerman province of southeastern Iran have shown the existence of an important urban centre during the Early Bronze Age (third millennium BC), with a rich artistic and craft tradition as well as long-distance contacts with both Mesopotamia and the Indus valley. Bioarchaeological studie...
Recent archaeological discoveries in the Halil Rud valley in the Kerman province of southeastern Iran have shown the existence of an important urban centre during the Early Bronze Age (third millennium BC), with a rich artistic and craft tradition as well as long-distance contacts with both Mesopotamia and the Indus valley. Bioarchaeological studie...
Attempts to understand the origins of domestication and sedentary settlement in the Near East have traditionally focused on the Fertile Crescent. Beyond this region, however, in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains of north-eastern Iran, evidence has emerged that charts the Neolithic transition over a period of 1500 years. Investigations at the tw...
The paper is the first account on the excavation of the PPN site of Tappeh Qanzanchi near Kermanshah (Zagros). We present the other finds of Chalcolithic and Bronze Age levels that are also present in the long stratigraphic sequence.
The origins and prehistory of domestic sheep (Ovis aries) are incompletely understood; to address this, we generated data from 118 ancient genomes spanning 12,000 years sampled from across Eurasia. Genomes from Central Türkiye ~8000 BCE are genetically proximal to the domestic origins of sheep but do not fully explain the ancestry of later populati...
In 2016 and 2018, the Iran-China Joint Expedition carried out two seasons of fieldwork at Tepe Naderi, which is composed of an imposing tepe and a dilapidated adobe fortification wall enclosing it. The expedition implemented a multidisciplinary research strategy, comprising radiocarbon, archaeometric, archaeobotanical, and zooarchaeological studies...
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...
The extremely rich palaeontological record of the horse family, also known as equids, has provided many examples of macroevolutionary change over the last ~55 Mya. This family is also one of the most documented at the palaeogenomic level, with hundreds of ancient genomes sequenced. While these data have advanced understanding of the domestication h...
The Douzlākh salt deposit (region: Māhneshān, Zanjān Province, Iran) is unique for its pure and crystal rock salt and was an important supplier of culinary (‘table’) salt in Achaemenid, Sassanid and Middle Islamic times. At the same time, the site was of central importance to the economic life of the rural populations in the Talkherud Basin. This a...
Ritual practices as behavior, and the cognitive acknowledgment of life and death, foster a depth in social identity, collective social memory, and a societal worldview. This paper outlines the evidence of Early Bronze Age burial practices in northwestern Iran to discuss the newly discovered chamber tombs at Kohne Tepesi within the broader context o...
Occupied between ~10,300 and 9300 years ago, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic site of Aşıklı Höyük in Central Anatolia went through early phases of sheep domestication. Analysis of 629 mitochondrial genomes from this and numerous sites in Anatolia, southwest Asia, Europe, and Africa produced a phylogenetic tree with excessive coalescences (nodes) around t...
Tappe Takhchar-Abad, near Birjand in south Khorasan, is a recently discovered and excavated almost circular adobe building with six towers, dating to the Achaemenid period. This article suggests that the architectural tradition of circular buildings and sites in the late Iron Age/Achaemenid period, in Greater Khorasan, apparently originated from Ba...
Located in the Zagros Mountains, not far from Kermanshah, in the country's west, the Wezmeh cave has yielded many remains from the Upper Pleistocene and the Holocene. This archaeological documentation sheds new light on human occupations and fauna of this region for at least 70,000 years. Due to the importance of these discoveries, most of which we...
The pronounced growth in livestock populations since the 1950s has altered the epidemiological and evolutionary trajectory of their associated pathogens. For example, Marek’s disease virus (MDV), which causes lymphoid tumors in chickens, has experienced a marked increase in virulence over the past century. Today, MDV infections kill >90% of unvacci...
Equids have shaped past Eurasian societies in many ways. This applies in particular to domestic horses, donkeys, and their hybrids. Key to documenting modes of exploitation and cultural trajectories in past societies is the correct taxonomic classification of tooth and bone specimens found in archaeological sites. However, close osteomorphological...
The horse is central to many Indigenous cultures across the American Southwest and the Great Plains. However, when and how horses were first integrated into Indigenous lifeways remain contentious, with extant models derived largely from colonial records. We conducted an interdisciplinary study of an assemblage of historic archaeological horse remai...
This paper presents the first investigations of lipid preserved in bones and ceramics, from sites of various ages and depositional environments in Iran with the aim of using them in palaeodietary and chronological reconstructions. We also characterized modern dairy products from the region using stable carbon isotope values to provide a local refer...
Ziwiye, as one of the key sites for Iran's North West Iron Age (Median kingdom), has many masterpieces kept in different museums and a long list of publications. The main part of this list consists of monographs that are written based on one or more limited objects from an out of context collection. There are few articles that comprehensively inclu...
The question of mobility of Bronze Age societies in southern Central Asia is a lively subject for discussion and remains a key aspect for understanding past human life. Central Asia represents a region where mobility and migration had a deep impact on the development of cultural communities. Surrounded by the great empires of the ancient Near East,...
Direkli Cave, located in the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey, was occupied by Late Epipaleolithic hunters-gatherers for the seasonal hunting and processing of game including large numbers of wild goats. We report genomic data from new and published Capra specimens from Direkli Cave and, supplemented with historic genomes from multiple Capra spe...
Donkeys transformed human history as essential beasts of burden for long-distance movement, especially across semi-arid and upland environments. They remain insufficiently studied despite globally expanding and providing key support to low- to middle-income communities. To elucidate their domestication history, we constructed a comprehensive genome...
The Oxus Civilisation (or Bactrio-Margian Archaeological Complex, BMAC) was the main archaeological culture of the Bronze Age in southern Central Asia. Paleogenetic analyses were previously conducted mainly on samples from the eastern part of BMAC. The population associated with BMAC descends from local Chalcolithic populations, with some outliers...
Hybrids of horse and donkey, which have been valued in the Mediterranean basin since the Iron Age, became integrated into the animal world north of the Alps in the course of Romanization. Until now, however, their true contribution to the economic and military life in the northern Roman provinces Raetia, Noricum and Upper Pannonia (southern Germany...
A bstract
Direkli Cave, located in the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey, was occupied by Late Epipaleolithic hunters-gatherers for the seasonal hunting and processing of game including large numbers of wild goats. We report genomic data from new and published Capra specimens from Direkli Cave and, supplemented with historic genomes from multiple...
Over the last decade, the petrous bone (petrosum) has become the ultimate repository of ancient biomolecules, leading to a plea for a more ethical curation preventing the systematic destruction of this bioarchaeological archive. Here, we propose to explore the biosystematic signal encompassed in the biological form of 152 petrosa from modern popula...
We investigated the controversial origin of domestic sheep (Ovis aries) using large samples of contemporary and ancient domestic individuals and their closest wild relatives: the Asiatic mouflon (Ovis gmelini), the urial (Ovis vignei) and the argali (Ovis ammon). A phylogeny based on mitochondrial DNA, including 213 new cytochrome‐b sequences of wi...
To go further, we compared modern wild and domestic shapes and archaeological shapes classed by major chronological periods, from Neolithic to present. In fig. 4, you can observe the distribution of 245 individuals in the first three principal components coloured according to their chronological assignment. MANOVA result indicates significant diffe...
The models predicting the spatial distribution of species can simulate the suitability of species habitats on different spatial scales, based on species records and site characteristics to gain insight into ecological or evolutionary drivers or to help predict habitat suitability across large scales. Species distribution models (SDMs) based on pres...
The trilingual, highly illustrated book comprises a Persian text with two long summaries in French and English. Designed for a wide readership interested in archaeology and its various disciplines, it offers an archaeozoological reading of the Iranian Prehistory and Antiquity. The book is divided into 4 chapters: 1- The importance of biological rem...
Habitat suitability models are useful tools for a variety of wildlife management objectives. Distributions of wildlife species can be predicted for geographical areas that have not been extensively surveyed. The basis of these models' work is to minimize the relationship between species distribution and biotic and abiotic environments. For some spe...
Habitat suitability models are useful tools for a variety of wildlife management objectives. Distributions of wildlife species can be predicted for geographical areas that have not been extensively surveyed. The basis of these models' work is to minimize the relationship between species distribution and biotic and abiotic environments. For some spe...
Gūnespān is located in the southeastern part of Malayer, in Hamadan Province in Iran. The main occupation occurred during the Bronze Age and Late Iron Age (Median) periods. The study of archaeozoological assemblages from these peri-ods revealed that sheep/goat and cattle constitute the bulk of the exploited animal resources, showing that these huma...
Domestication of horses fundamentally transformed long-range mobility and warfare¹. However, modern domesticated breeds do not descend from the earliest domestic horse lineage associated with archaeological evidence of bridling, milking and corralling2–4 at Botai, Central Asia around 3500 bc³. Other longstanding candidate regions for horse domestic...
Mummified remains have long attracted interest as a potential source of ancient DNA. However, mummification is a rare process that requires an anhydrous environment to rapidly dehydrate and preserve tissue before complete decomposition occurs. We present the whole-genome sequences (3.94 X) of an approximately 1600-year-old naturally mummified sheep...
Over the past fifteen years the French archaeological mission in the UAE has excavated several areas of Masāfī in Fujairah. A Late Bronze Age settlement was found in MSF-5 and Iron Age architectural remains in MSF-1, MSF-2 and MSF-3 that include respectively a public building, fortified settlements, and a temple possibly dedicated to the cult of th...
Significance
Goats were among the first domestic animals and today are an important livestock species; archaeozoological evidence from the Zagros Mountains of western Iran indicates that goats were managed by the late ninth/early eighth millennium. We assess goat assemblages from Ganj Dareh and Tepe Abdul Hosein, two Aceramic Neolithic Zagros sites...
Mummified remains have long attracted interest as a potential source of ancient DNA. However, mummification is a rare process that requires an anhydrous environment to rapidly dehydrate and preserve tissue before complete decomposition occurs. We present the whole genome sequences (3.94X) of a~1600 year old naturally mummified sheep recovered from...
Mummified remains have long attracted interest as a potential source of ancient DNA. However, mummification is a rare process that requires an anhydrous environment to rapidly dehydrate and preserve tissue before complete decomposition occurs. We present the whole genome sequences of a ~1600 year old naturally mummified sheep recovered from Chehrāb...
Wezmeh Cave is located 46 km southwest of Kermanshah, southeast of Islamabad-e Gharb, in the Qaziwand Mountain. Discovery of a large number of late Pleistocene faunal remains, a Neanderthal premolar tooth, as well as Early Holocene human remains and cultural materials (Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods) in this site yielded rich data that can shed...
Two mummified bats were found in an ancient salt mine near Chehrabad, NW Iran. One complete and one partial skeletons, both associated with parts of the pelage, were identified as Eptesicus gobiensis, a bat species rare in the Middle East. The comparison of skull and statistical evaluation of craniodental data showed this bat to belong to the ident...
From an archaeological perspective, the Araxes river basin is still one of the lesser known areas, either its northern or southern sides. Recent archaeological surveys and excavations at different sites in the recent decade shed more light on the cultural development of the basin, especially in the Khoda Afarin and Jolfa Plain as well as the Mughan...
Samotherium Major, 1888 (Giraffidae) is recorded from several late Miocene localities, primarily
in the Balkans, the northern Black Sea region, Anatolia, central Asia and China. The first complete
cranial material, with several mandibular rami, and postcranials of Samotherium are described here
from the Middle Maragheh sequence in northwest Iran. T...
This Historical and Archaeological Atlas of the Ancient Near East brings together accurate and high-quality maps and reports on the latest research findings. It responds to a pressing need for the entire international scientific community working on the pre-classical Near East. The atlas covers the period from the beginning of the Epipaleolithic, a...
Southwest Asia is climatically and topographically a highly diverse region in the xeric belt of the Old World. Its diversity of arid habitats and climatic conditions acted as an important area for the evolution and diversification of up to 20 (of 38 known) independent Eudicot C4 origins. Some of these lineages present unique evolutionary strategies...
Southwest Asia is climatically and topographically a highly diverse region in the xeric belt of the Old World. Its diversity of arid habitats and climatic conditions acted as an important area for the evolution and diversification of up to 20 (of 38 known) independent Eudicot C4 origins. Some of these lineages present unique evolutionary strategies...