Journal article
Holocene settlement shifts and palaeoenvironments on the central iranian plateau: Investigating linked systems
A Schmidt, M Quigley, M Fattahi, G Azizi, M Maghsoudi, H Fazeli
Holocene | Published : 2011
Abstract
For thousands of years, humans have inhabited locations that are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, earthquakes, and floods. In order to investigate the extent to which Holocene environmental changes may have impacted on cultural evolution, we present new geologic, geomorphic, and chronologic data from the Qazvin Plain in northwest Iran that provides a backdrop of natural environmental changes for the simultaneous cultural dynamics observed on the Central Iranian Plateau. Well-resolved archaeological data from the neighbouring settlements of Zagheh (7170-6300 yr BP), Ghabristan (6215-4950 yr BP) and Sagzabad (4050-2350 yr BP) indicate that Holocene occupation of the Hajiarab..
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Funding Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge the help they received during fieldwork by numerous assistants, amongst them Mustafa Kharambur, Ali Zaldaghai and Ali Keshavarz Alleg. In addition to being a great help in the field, Reza Sohbati undertook an extensive evaluation of the seismic data for the study area (see Quigley et al., 2011). Financial support came from the British Institute of Persian Studies and support in kind by the Iranian Center for Archaeological Research and the University of Tehran. The OSL ages were determined in the luminescence laboratory of the Sheffield Centre for International Drylands Research. The School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne under Professor Hergt facilitated desktop research following the fieldwork and Dr Cupper helped to further contextualise the OSL data. The comments of two anonymous reviewers have greatly improved the manuscript.