16th – 18th of December 2025 – Online
Organized as part of the DFG Priority Programme 2176, “The Iranian Highlands: Resilience and Integration in Pre-Modern Societies,” this three-day online conference explores how people have shaped, modified, and inhabited the landscapes of the Iranian Highlands over the course of millennia. The event builds on two complementary perspectives:
Landscape Archaeology, which views the landscape not as a passive backdrop but as an archive of human activity. It investigates spatial patterns, infrastructures, ecological traces, and material remains as interconnected signatures that reveal how societies organized themselves in relation to their surroundings.
Anthropogenic Landscapes, which denote landscapes marked by human action, whether through deliberate interventions such as irrigation, terracing, and mining, or through unintended consequences including erosion, deforestation, and soil change. These landscapes reflect both everyday adaptation and long-term transformation.
By bringing together archaeologists and scholars from related fields, the conference seeks to trace the dynamic interplay between humans and their environment. Rather than a simple chain of cause and effect, this interplay unfolded through complex feedback loops. With the aid of modern analytical tools such as GIS, spatial modelling, and remote sensing, we aim to follow the material traces of these processes, to understand how communities sought to make the highlands habitable, how they exploited and managed resources, and how these practices in turn reshaped the very landscapes on which they relied.
The Iranian Highlands, with their diverse topography, fragile ecologies, and shifting political boundaries, provide an especially rich setting for such inquiries. Over the course of three days, this conference will serve as a forum to investigate how intentional and unintentional transformations accumulated into the cultural landscapes we encounter today. Sessions will be streamed via the open-source platform BigBlueButton, with spaces dedicated to presentations and breakout discussions. The event is free of charge and open to scholars, students, and anyone interested in the long-term dynamics of human–environment interaction in the Iranian Highlands.
Click here to access the ECAL Conference Booklet.
We warmly welcome all participants to this online workshop and look forward to three days of presentations and discussion.
For registration and for receiving the conference link, please contact us at ecal.workshop@iranhighlands.com.