Yafteh is a Upper Paleolithic cave located at the foot of Yafteh Mountain, north-west of Khoramabad, Western Zagros, Iran.
The site was found and later excavated by two American archaeologists, Frank Hole and Kent Flannery, in the 1960s. It contained a thick Upper Paleolithic sequence which yielded bladelets and tools. A number of C14 dates indicate that the site was occupied mainly between 30 to 35 thousands years ago. Hole and Flannery published some results of their excavation at Yafteh in a general paper about their excavations in prehistoric sites in Loristan and Dehluran. The lithic assemblages from 1967 excavations was re-analyzed in 2005 by Bordes & Shidrang and later these assemblages were the main subject of a MA thesis in 2007. The site was re-excavated in 2005 by a joint Belgian-Iranian team directed by Marcel Otte and Fereidoun Biglari and recently excavated again by Otte and Sonia Shidrang in 2008. Yafteh has yielded the largest number of C14 dates from a single Paleolithic site in Iran that are clustered around 28-35 thousands years ago. A rich collection of ornaments made of marine shells, tooth and hematite has been discovered in the early Upper Paleolithic deposits in both early and recent excavations in the Yafteh cave. This rich collection was analyzed and published by Sonia Shidrang in the Iranian Journal of Archaeology and History.
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