High Risk Exploratory Research: Archaeological investigations on the Mehran plain, southwest Iran

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

The Revolution of 1978 and the subsequent Eight Year War with Iraq resulted in the cessation of systematic fieldwork in Iran by foreign archaeologists. With the support of the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization, an international team co-directed by Abbas Alizadeh and Nicholas Kouchoukos will begin a new program of field research in the arid southwest region of the country. Here, archaeologists in the 1960s and early 1970s produced a rich material record of fundamental transformations in the economic and political organization of human societies, including the emergence of sedentary agriculture, nomadic pastoralism, cities, states and empires. To accomplish this, they developed a powerful synthesis of archaeological method and anthropological theory that moved Near Eastern prehistory from an orientalist antiquarianism to the forefront of the influential New Archaeology. To resume work in southwest Iran after nearly 25 years is therefore to take up again an enduring set of research problems and a lapsed conversation between archaeology and social theory. With these goals in mind, Drs. Abbas Alizadeh, Nicholas Kouchoukos and their colleagues will conduct six weeks of exploratory survey and excavation on the Mehran Plain in autumn 2001. Their research will address interrelated sets of questions concerning: 1) the history of human-environment interactions, specifically the domestication of sheep and goat, the adoption of agriculture, and the development of canal irrigation; 2) the interaction between pastoral nomads and settled farmers in the emergence and development of social and political complexity in the region; and 3) the relationship between emerging polities of southwest Iran and the neighboring, more precocious city-states of southern Mesopotamia. Located near the natural habitat of the wild ancestors of domesticated cereals and caprines, within the traditional winter grazing lands of mobile pastoralists, and along the most important historic route between Mesopotamia and Iran, the Mehran Plain is ideally located for such investigations. Field research will focus on the excavation of two known sites which together provide a continuous, stratified sequence of artifact, floral, and faunal assemblages spanning the 9th through 4th millennia BC. Fieldwork and subsequent analysis will focus in particular on changing practices of plant and animal exploitation and the social logics and intersecting institutional forms through which agricultural and pastoral production were valorized, intensified and integrated. Ultimately, the project will attempt to understand the development of these practices and structures in their local, regional and global context.