چکیده:
We had the opportunity to examine the cranium of a young woman found at the well-known Neolithic site of Ali Kosh on the Deh Luran plain in southwestern Iran. It has previously been claimed that her head shows traces of modification, a practice which can be termed as either cultural or artificial cranial modification. Here, we describe several macroscopic characteristics of the modified crania and discuss how this claim can be dismissed. Our craniometric study of the Ali Kosh cranium showed that the morphological state of that cranium is analogous to that of the crania of modern humans. A comparison of the morphological change patterns of deformed crania and development of wormian bones with that of Ali Kosh suggest that the Ali Kosh cranium is not the result of artificial head deformations.
خلاصه ماشینی:
"A comparison of the morphological change patterns of deformed crania and development of wormian bones with that of Ali Kosh suggest that the Ali Kosh cranium is not the result of artificial head deformations.
Keywords : Artificial or cultural modifications; Ali Kosh cranium; Cranial morphological change; Wormian bones Introduction he term "artificial or cultural modification" is used to describe practices which alter the shape of the cranium in infancy and early childhood.
Since then, the Ali Kosh lady’s cranium has been used as a reference to prove existence of artificial cranial modification processes in Neolithic Iran (see for example: Daems and Croucher, 2007).
If the Ali Kosh lady’s cranium shows traces of what Hole has termed ‘extreme cranial deformation’ (Hole 1977: 344-345), we should expect to see at least one or some morphological changes which are generally represented by the modified crania.
We used several diagnostic criteria by examining the morphological change patterns of deformed crania together with Wormian bone development, allowed that the identification of the Ali Kosh lady’s cranium does not reflect a significant magnitude of alteration.
We have argued that the reason for misclassifying the Ali Kosh lady cranium as a deformed type may have been firstly due to its preservation state having prevented any accurate assessment at the time of excavation, and secondly, due to the higher frequencies of deformed crania found over the different phases of the Ali Kosh site excavation (and contemporaneously from the various Near Eastern prehistoric sites), which might as a result, have led Frank Hole to the same claim."