Darra-i Kur

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Variant Name: Baba Darwish

Badakhshan Province. Just northeast of Kalafgan near the village of Chinar-i Gunjus Khan 63 kilometers east of Taluqan, on the road to Faizabad. The cave is high up on the side of the valley near the hamlet of Baba Darwish.

Dates: Middle Palaeolithic, 50,000-30,000 BC (carbon 14 and lithic evidence);
Late Neolithic/Bronze Age, circa 2,200-1,900 BC
(carbon 14, ceramic, lithic evidence).

A rock shelter, well-stratified in silt deposits laid down by a stream. Approximately 800 stone implements were recovered, of two basic types: flint and sickle blades, and large diabase points. Other finds included celts, scrapers, pounders, blades, simple jewellery, fauna (fish, rodent, horse, domesticated sheep and goat), a fragment of a Homonid right temporal bone, many bone implements and three fragments of tin bronze. Ceramics were mostly crude, black wares, sometimes decorated. The only architecture was 80 post-holes, suggestive of tents. The only burials were three articulated goat burials.