Volume 68, no. 3
December 2005

Archeology in Iran

ON THE COVER:
This snarling winged lion worked in gold shows the extraordinary sill of Achaemenid goldsmiths. The roundell is probably from Ecbatana and is dated to the reign of Artaxerxes II, ca. 404-359 BCE. Photo courtesy of The Oriental Institute, Chicago.

Eight Thousand Years of History in Fars Province, Iran
By D.T. Potts, K. Roustaei, K. Alamdari K. Alizadeh, A. Asgari Chaverdi, A. Khosrowzadeh, L. Niakan, C.A. Petrie, M. Seyedin, L.R. Weeks, B. McCall, and M. Zaidi

Life in a Fifth-Millenium BCE Village
by Reinhard Bernbeck, Hassan Fazeli, and Susan Pollock

Economy, Environment, and the Beginnings of Civilization in Southeastern Iran
by Mehdi Mortazavi

Elamite Funerary Clay Heads
by Javier Alvarez-Mon

The Politics of Parthian Coinage in Media
by Farhang Khademi Nadooshan, Seyed Sadrudin Moosavi, and Frouzandeh Jafarzadeh

DEPARTMENTS

ARTI-FACTS

No Longer Forgotten, Ancient Persia Comes to the British Museum
by Jack Green

Coinage, War, and Peace in Fourht-Century Yehud
by Bradley W. Root

REVIEWS

The Invention of Cuneiform
(Kevin McGeough)

Aspects of Empire in Achaemenid Sardis
(Phillip Kaplan)

Earthly Paradises: Ancient Gardens in History and Archaeology
(Naomi F. Miller)

FORUM

Visiting Archaeological Sites in Iran
Denise Schmandt-Besserat

84 Eight Thousand Years of History in Fars Province, Iran

By D.T. Potts, K. Roustaei, K. Alamdari K. Alizadeh, A. Asgari Chaverdi, A. Khosrowzadeh, L. Niakan, C.A. Petrie, M. Seyedin, L.R. Weeks, B. McCall, and M. Zaidi

The authors report on recent excavations at two sites in the Mamasani District of Fars Province, where settlement began as early as the Neolithic period. These sites are also put in their proper context, as the authors survey the remarkable remains of eight thousand years of history in one of the archaeologically best-known regions of Iran.

94 Life in a Fifth-Millennium BCE Village
by Reinhard Bernbeck, Hassan Fazeli, and Susan Pollock

The ancient mound of Rahmatabad will soon be enombed by a modern highway. In response, archaeologists from the United States and Iran have been working to salvage what information they can about the fifth-millenium village that lies beneath it. In describing the 2005 season's finds, the authors provide us with a vivid glimpse of what life might have been like in this prehistoric village.

106 Economy, Environment, and the Beginnings of Civilizations in Southeastern Iran
by Mehdi Mortazavi
Shahr-i Sokhta was an important urban center for more than a millennium in Iran's Early Bronze Age. Its wealth is probably attributable to its role as an intermediary in the lapis lazuli trade between Afghanistan and the markets of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Also instrumental in connecting east with west in this period were the so-called Kulli people of southeastern Iran. The author traces these trade relations through the Early Bronze Age and postulates that, just as early urban society in Iran owed its rise to this trade, so too it owed its demise in the second millennium to the decrease in that trade.

114 Elamite Funerary Clay Heads
By Javier Alvarez-Mon

Of all the magnificent examples of Elamite art, the decorated clay heads buried in Elamite graves are probably the least well known. The one-thousand-year-long tradition of placing these portraits of relatives of the dead next to their heads upon burial is unique to Iran and may be connected to a belief that the soul of the deceased needed protection during the journey to the underworld, which in Elamite religion was a land of gloom and deep darkness.

123 The Politics of Parthian Coinage in Media
By Farhang Khademi Nadooshan, Seyed Sadrudin Moosavi, and Frouzandeh Jafarzadeh

The Parthians (250 BCE-224 CE) succeeded in establishing one of the most lasting empires of the ancient Near East, but the satrapy of Media, in the Iranian heartland, did not fully become a part of Parthia until over one hundred years after the first Parthian conquests in the region. For years, the Parthian coins from Media have sat relatively unnoticed in museums in Tabriz and Lorestan. However, these very objects may hold the key to explaining the nature of the Parthian presence in Media, a region, the authors argue, that was politically and culturally divided.