Our knowledge about the beginning of Pottery Neolithic in the southeast of the Caspian Sea was previously limited a short report by Coon who first excavated Hotu and Kamarband Caves in 1949 and 1951respectively. However, these two sites were recently re-excavated by Fazeli Nashli in 2021. This provided us with a revision of the emergence of pottery throughout the region. A number of previous excavations carried out in northeastern Iran and Turkmenistan showed pottery Neolithic sites. This allowed Dyson to propose three Pottery Horizons in northeastern Iran, started with the "Caspian Neolithic Software" dating back to 6600 BC. The second stage of the pottery Neolithic began with the “Djeitun-type”. However, Gregg and Thornton later revised the Neolithic Pottery of the southern Caspian Sea and correctly suggested that there is no evidence of Djeitun-type within the pottery collection of Coon. They assumed the Pottery Neolithic of the Caspian Seas should have started ca. 6000 BC. During the course of the 2021Hotu excavation around 70cm of pottery Neolithic layers were recorded and then radiocarbon dated to ca. 6400 BC, though additional underlying layers of the pottery Neolithic have not yet been dated. Therefore, we propose that the Caspian Sea Pottery Neolithic seems to have started ca.6600 BC, supporting former Dyson’s chronology. While the East Sang-e Chakhmaq, on the southern flanks of the Alborz Mountains, yielded the earliest pottery around 6350 BC, our current data suggest that the cave dwellers of the southern Caspian were local pioneers of pottery production in western Asia.
