SPP 2176:  The Iranian Highlands: Resilience and Integration of Premodern Societies

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Construction Engineering and Architecture ; Geosciences ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 402379177

The Iranian highlands played a significant role in cultural developments in the Near East throughout the history of the region. Its societies interacted closely with neighboring cultures to which they repeatedly developed political and economic ties. From the perspective of Mesopotamia, the Caucasus and Middle Asia, intensified relationships with the Iranian highlands developed again and again, whether through economic activities, migration or political inclusion. From their side, Iranian highland societies were able to integrate these relationships into their own networks as well as to modify or resist them. The highlands and its actors were thereby periodically able to play a formative role in relation to their surroundings and to effect political, economic and social changes. Investigations within SPP-projects shall be based on three fields of research: raw material regimes, institutional relationships and mobility of the inhabitants. Various forms of crisis management and resilience, but also the integrative potential are core elements of these highland societies. These will be investigated and diachronically compared by help of the coordination project of the SPP 2176: The various scientific results shall be condensed by six work packages that range from a data-base and Web-GIS-project, to a joint analytical strategy, a series of works-shops and conferences as well as to an integration of Iranian scholars and foreign fellows to our program. It is an explicit goal of the coordination project to develop and support mutuality with Iranian colleagues and institution in order to develop joint scientific goals and results within the project. In Phase 2, we evaluate the Iranian highlands from multi-scalar, longue durée perspective as a mosaic of landscapes with ecological changes (including climate), middle-term conjunctures, and a short-term history of events. Neither historical-geopolitical nor eco-deterministic perspectives are at the base of this understanding, but rather an integrated view of materializations of practices and the institutional and organizational structures they (co-)produce.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• International Connection: France, Iran, Switzerland

Projects

• A new Elamite archive from Goshtaspi: Agricultural administration in the late Middle-Elamite kingdom (around 1100 BCE) (Applicant Sallaberger, Walther )
• Becoming resilient in the Urmia Plain: A view from Tappeh Balu, Northwestern Iran (Applicant Maziar, Ph.D., Sepideh )
• Coordination Funds (Applicant Stöllner, Thomas )
• CrossHighlands: Mobility and Resource Procurement Strategies in the Mountains of Kohgiluyeh (southwestern Iran) (Applicant Ricci, Andrea )
• Dynamics of Development and Transformations of Ownership in Western Fars: The Bozpar Valley (Bushehr Region, Iran) (Applicant Hauser, Stefan R. )
• Fragile Images: Clay Media in Early Iran - the materiality and imagery of administrative practices in the Late Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age (FRIMCLAY) (Applicant Helwing, Barbara )
• HighStepLands. Holocene socio-cultural-environmental interactions along a highland altitudinal transect of the Zagros Mountains (Kohgiluyeh-e Boyer Ahmad Province, Southwestern Iran) (Applicant Ricci, Andrea )
• Last Neanderthal and early Homo sapiens occupations in the Bawa Yawan Rockshelter, Kermanshah, West-Central Zagros Mountains (Iran). (Applicant Heydari-Guran, Ph.D., Saman )
• Mobile villages and dynamic landscapes: the Varamin Plain from the late 5th to the early 3rd mill. BCE PART 2: Excavations at Tell Begum in the Shahrizor Plain (Applicant Bernbeck, Reinhard )
• Neolithic Dynamics across Lake Urmia: segregation, integration and mobility in NW-Iran (Applicant Thomalsky, Judith )
• Parthian Imperial Control and Local Agency in the Central Zagros Highlands (Applicant Brown, Ph.D., Michael )
• Reconstructing paleoenvironments of highland societies in Iran from sedimentary records of Holocene climate change and landscape evolution (Applicant Kehl, Martin )
• Resilience of Iron Age Communities on the Eastern Flank of the Zagros Mountains’ Chaîne Magistale in the context of the Assyrian Expansion towards the Western Iranian Highlands (Applicant Kreppner, Florian Janoscha )
• The Iranian highlands: Mining regions of the Central Plateau between resilient and precarious societal and economic strategies. (Applicant Stöllner, Thomas )
• The unexplored heartland: institutional landscapes and networks in eastern Fārs Phase 2: Operating the institutional landscape: Nīrīz (Applicants Henkelman, Wouter ;  Kaniuth, Kai )
• Tracking the Mongol Presence in Iran: Seasonal Routes of Migration and Building Activities (Applicants Hoffmann, Birgitt ;  Korn, Lorenz )
• Transformation of Institutional Landscapes at Dehqāed (Bushehr region) (Applicant Zehbari, Ph.D., Zohreh )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Thomas Stöllner