Pastoral Nomadism in the Iranian Highlands during Late Antiquity

Chapter 4 focuses on the process and factors behind the landscape-related and sociopolitical transformations in the Farsan region in Late Antiquity. After discussing the region’s geography and earlier research in the Bakhtoyari area, settlement systems and the long-term cultural processes of landscape transformation from prehistory to Late Antiquity are studied. Accordingly, it is argued that, after developments already from the Achaemenid to the Elymaean (late Seleucid-Parthian) period, the long-standing settlement system of Farsan in the Sasanian era underwent unprecedented changes that signify socioeconomic shifts in terms of the modes of economy of the inhabitants of the region and their complex social structures. The changes are recognised in land use; site location; and settlement hierarchy, patterns, and systems based on the spatial distribution of cultural materials acquired from systematic, intensive surveys of the region and excavations at the late Sasanian administrative centre of Tappe h Bardnakōn.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Geography · Late Antiquity · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Eurasian Exchange Networks · History · Islamic Studies and History