Coming to Terms with the Future: Concepts of Resilience for the Study of Early Iranian Societies

The collection of essays in this book focuses on the highlands of Iran in pre-modern times, reaching from the Paleolithic to the medieval period. What holds the diverse contributions together is an issue that is closely related to debates in our own times: crises and how societies in the past dealt with them. We start from the premise that general circumstances in the fractured topographic structure of the Iranian highlands led to unique relations between ecological, social, economic and political conditions.

In three sections entitled “Climate and palaeoenvironment”, “Settlement, subsistence and mobility” and “Political and economic institutions”, the authors ask what sorts of crises afflicted past societies in the Iranian highlands, to what extent they proved resilient, and especially what strategies they developed for enhancing the resilience of their ways of life. Looking for answers in paleoenvironmental proxy data, archaeological findings and written sources, the authors examine subsistence economies, political institutions, religious beliefs, everyday routines and economic specialization in different temporal, spatial and organizational scales.

This book is the first volume of a series published by the German-Iranian research cooperation “The Iranian Highlands: Resiliences and Integration in Premodern Societies”. The goal of the research project is to shine a new light on communities and societies that populated the Iranian highlands and their more or less successful strategies to cope with the many vagaries, the constant changes and risks of their natural and humanly shaped environments.

Table of Contents

Climate and palaeoenvironment

Holocene Paleoenvironmental Change and Phases of Drought in the Iranian Highlands. A Review
Martin Kehl, Babak Rafiei-Alavi, Hamid Alizadeh Ketek Lahijani

The Impact of Climate on Human Occupations in Iran from the Neolithic to the Early Iron Age: An Attempt to Link Archaeological and Paleoclimate Records
Babak Rafiei-Alavi, Martin Kehl, Hamid Alizadeh Ketek Lahijani

Evidence of Neanderthal Resilience from Forty-five to Thirty-nine Thousand Years Ago at the Bawa Yawan Rockshelter, Kermanshah, Zagros Highlands
Saman Heydari-Guran, Nemat Hariri, Martin Kehl, Samran Asiabani, Faramarz Azizi, Elham Ghasidian

Water Stress and Imperial Politics in the Southern Zagros Mountains: An Interdisciplinary Approach in Long-Term Perspective
Andrea Ricci, Silvia Balatti, Elodie Brisset, Morteza Djamali, Abdolmajid Naderi Beni, Ahmad Azadi, Pejman Firoozbakhsh

Settlement, subsistence and mobility

Resilience in Practice: A View from the Kura-Araxes Cultural Tradition in Iran
Sepideh Maziar

Reaching the Breaking Point? Developments in the Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age Varamin Plain
Susan Pollock, Morteza Hessari, Reinhard Bernbeck

The Bronze and Iron Age of Mazandaran (3200–1000 BCE): Resilience and Cultural Adaptability
Hassan Fazeli Nashli, Mojtaba Safari, Yunshi Huang, Zhenhua Deng, Hadi Davoudi, Xiaohong Wu

The Environmental Limitations for the Pastoral-Nomadic Way of Life in the Karadagh Highlands of Northwestern Iran: Evidence from the Iron Age I-II and Modern Times
Bahram Ajorloo

Political and economic institutions

Second-Year Cows for Manlari. Elamite State Investment in Cattle Husbandry in the Southern Zagros Mountains
Azam Rayat and Walther Sallaberger

Coping with Problems of Mining: Approaching Resilience Strategies through the Study of Resource-Scapes in the Iranian Highlands
Thomas Stöllner

Imperial Control and Highland Resilience in the Parthian Zagros
Michael Brown and Shelir Amelirad

Resilience in Centralized State Systems. The Persepolis Fortification Archive and Achaemenid Institutional Longevity
Wouter F. M. Henkelman, Kai Kaniuth, Kourosh Mohammadkhani

Prestigious Building and Urban Development in Ilkhanid Iran: The Rabʿ-i Rashīdī in Tabrīz as an Example of Resilience and Vulnerability in a Long-Term Perspective
Birgitt Hoffmann, Lorenz Korn, Thomas Lorain, Jonas Elbers, Maryam Moeini

Dynamics of Development and Resilience in Western Fars: The Bozpar Valley
Stefan R. Hauser, Giuseppe Labisi, Elnaz Rashidian

Reinhard Bernbeck is professor at the Institut für Vorderasiatische Archäologie at the Freie Universität Berlin. Previously, he taught at Bryn Mawr College and in the Department of Anthropology at Binghamton University.

Apart from the work in Turkmenistan reported here, he has pursued fieldwork in Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Iran, and more recently in Germany, where he has worked on sites of conflict from the last century. He has a long-standing interest in the political and ideological dimensions of archaeology, as well as in the emergence of social inequalities.

He has authored several monographs, among them Theorien in der Archäologie (1997) and recently Materielle Spuren des nationalsozialistischen Terrors (2017). He has co-edited numerous books, including Ideologies in Archaeology (with Randall H. McGuire, 2011), Subjects and Narratives in Archaeology (with Ruth Van Dyke, 2015), and Interpreting the Late Neolithic in Upper Mesopotamia (with Olivier Nieuwenhuyse, Peter M.M.G. Akkermans and Jana Rogasch, 2013).

Susan Pollock is currently professor at the Institut für Vorderasiatische Archäologie at the Freie Universität Berlin. She previously held a position as Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY. She has longstanding research interests in the village and early state societies of Western Asia and has conducted field projects in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey as well as Turkmenistan.

Her recent work has involved much more recent periods, with field projects on sites of the 20th century in and around Berlin. She researches processes of subjectivation, commensality and food-related practices, political economy, and feminist approaches to the past.

She is the author of Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden that Never Was, editor of Between Feasts and Daily Meals. Toward an Archaeology of Commensal Spaces, and co-editor (with Reinhard Bernbeck and Kamyar Abdi) of The 2003 Excavations at Tol-e Baši, Iran: Social Life in a Neolithic Village.

Gisela Eberhardt is a project manager for the joint research project “The Iranian Highlands. Resiliences and Integration in Premodern Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin and an editor in the editorial department at the German Archaeological Institute’s (DAI) head office. She holds a PhD in archaeology from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and was one of the managing editors of Edition Topoi. She is the author of the book Deutsche Ausgrabung im ‘langen’ 19. Jahrhundert. Eine problemorientierte Untersuchung zur archäologischen Praxis (2011) and of the forthcoming chapter “From Deep Holes to the Bigger Picture. A History of Methods in Archaeological Excavation” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Archaeology as well as co-editor (with Fabian Link) of Historiographical Approaches to Past Archaeological Research (2015).