18th of December 2025 – Online
The Iranian Highlands, marked by diverse terrain, delicate ecosystems, and shifting political landscapes, provide a distinctive setting to examine how human communities have responded to environmental instability, changing resources, and socio-political shifts over thousands of years, often relying on flexible and adaptive subsistence strategies. At the center of this inquiry lies landscape archaeology, a tradition rooted in the legacy of Gordon Willey and expanded through contemporary approaches to space, adaptation, and human-environment interaction. As Luis A. Vivanco (2018, A Dictionary of Cultural Anthropology) notes, human-driven changes in anthropogenic landscapes may be intentional, such as shaping settlement patterns, resource use, and survival, or they may be unintended, resulting from broader ecological disruptions. Even seemingly natural environments may bear the imprint of past human activity that has shaped their present form.
By analyzing the spatial patterns of how people lived, worked, exchanged, and moved, we can better understand the cultural values and priorities that structured their relationship with the environment. From pastoral mobility and oasis farming to mining and long-distance trade, settlement systems in the Iranian Highlands were not passive reflections of their surroundings, but dynamic responses to environmental and social change mediated by ecological constraints, institutional choices, and long-term strategies for survival.
This online workshop organized within the framework of the DFG-funded Priority Programme SPP 2176 “The Iranian Highlands: Resilience and Integration of Premodern Societies” invites early-career researchers to explore the complex logics of anthropogenic landscapes. We are particularly interested in topics that examine:
- Resource extraction and raw-material-based economies, including mining, quarrying, bitumen harvesting, timber extraction, clay extraction and obsidian and flint sourcing and their influence on settlement patterns, environmental transformation, and subsistence adaptations.
- Hydraulic landscapes and water management, with attention to irrigation systems, qanats, and storage technologies that supported agricultural and urban expansion.
- Agricultural practices and land-use strategies, focusing on crop selection, cultivation techniques, and the interactions between farming and pastoralist communities.
- Urban development and settlement hierarchies, exploring the rise and decline of towns and cities in relation to environmental and socio-political dynamics.
- Subsistence strategies and daily life, as revealed through archaeobotanical, zooarchaeological, and socio-economic studies, including human responses to ecological stress and opportunity. Subsistence patterns were classified into a typology called modes of subsistence comprising pastoralism, agriculture, and industrialism. It also refers to the organized ways people acquire food and maintain their livelihoods and can also describe self-sufficient systems like subsistence agriculture.
By integrating archaeological, environmental, and ethnohistorical perspectives, the workshop aims to deepen our understanding of the dynamic processes that shaped the anthropogenic landscapes of the Iranian Highlands. An integrated landscape archaeology approach opens new interdisciplinary pathways to understanding how ancient communities adapted to and at times transformed their environments in pursuit of survival, stability, and development.
Further information about this upcoming workshop will be available soon.