## 2 Materials and Methodological Framework
### The Foothills of the Zagros Mountains, Iraqi Kurdistan  
Geo-ethnoarchaeological work conducted over recent years in the lower Zagros mountains has focused on livestock management, penning, grazing, fododering, manuring and other domestic activities, as well as on modern dung sampling, within the framework of ongoing archaeological excavations at Early Neolithic Bestansur, located on the western edge of the Shahrizor Plain in Iraqi Kurdistan, included on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List. These studies were followed by zooarchaeological, phytolith, dung spherulite, isotope, and soil analyses, in addition to comparative experimental burning of fresh dung pellets under laboratory-controlled conditions [17; 18; 40; 41; 42]. These investigations have explored how several households from the modern village of Bestansur (ca. 400 m north of the Neolithic mound), placed in an alluvial plain that supports arable farming based on cereal agriculture, horticultural crops, and the husbandry of sheep, goat and cattle, used and managed their livestock, with particular interest on dung exploitation and its secondary use, primarily as fertiliser and as a source of fuel for cooking and heating until the introduction of gas in the village in the 1980s. Through ethnographic fieldwork that included semi-structured interviews with villagers using questionnaires and photography under full permission following rigorous ethical protocols, the research gathered information on farming practices and dung management over time, including the collection of modern reference dung materials for integrated phosphorous and microfossil analyses from households, pasture grounds from the vicinity, and the lower foothills. By comparing phosphorous records to the concentrations of phytoliths and, particularly, to the quantities of calcitic spherulites that are excreted with the dung across samples from different animal producers (cattle and ovicaprines), results pointed to differences according to dietary regimens rather than to diverse animal species, although higher amounts of dung spherulites among sheep and goat samples were consistent with previous studies on spherulite production [49], thus providing a region-specific reference dataset within the environmental context of the archaeological study area [17]. Further, strontium isotope signatures pointed towards variations in environmental conditions between the lower foothills, where herds graze daily during the warm and dry months, particularly from spring onwards, and the alluvial floodplain. The dataset, however, was limited in size, and it needs to be expanded in the future to assess whether these observed differences are also significant in the archaeological sites located within the wider study region, in addition to approaching seasonal and yearly rhythms and patterns. Building on further ethnoarchaeological fieldwork conducted in the modern farming village of Bestansur and its pasture grounds, comprising the floodplain and the lower foothills, an integrated experimental study focused on the burning (heating) of fresh pellets under laboratory-controlled conditions was undertaken in order to investigate microfossil taphonomy and its implications for identifying fuel dung remains in archaeological contexts [18]. This study aimed at shedding light on the long-term uses of dung as both fuel and fertiliser, either in its organic form or after being burned, and on the scarcity at present of ethnographical dung fuel materials from the study area since the introduction of gas. One of the main goals of these experiments was to assess variations in ingested phytolith and dung spherulite abundances, as well as composition and preservation conditions within cattle and ovicaprine dung, as the manner in which heating affects both microfossil types remained understudied. These experimental records indicated significant changes in phytolith stability, integrity, and morphotype composition at temperatures ca.