Archaeologists Map a Lost Prehistoric Mound Beneath Dehdasht

TEHRAN -- The recent archaeological investigations at Dehdasht in Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province have begun to clarify not only the antiquity of the site, but also the relationship between its prehistoric occupation and the historic city that developed above it.
The significance of the excavation lies in the stratigraphic sequence itself: beneath the Islamic-period architecture of Beladshapur are deposits belonging to a substantially earlier settlement landscape.
Until the recent investigations, Dehdasht was principally understood through its surviving historic architecture and its association with the Safavid period.
The archaeological excavation provides a different perspective. Rather than treating the historic urban fabric as an isolated Safavid foundation, the excavators are examining it as the latest visible component of a much longer sequence of occupation.
The distinction is particularly important because much of the earlier archaeological landscape has disappeared beneath modern development.
The excavation team, led by Zabihollah Masoudnia, therefore established a small excavation area within the historic fabric to investigate deposits beneath the later architectural levels.
The procedure has allowed successive layers to be examined in their archaeological context rather than treating the prehistoric material as isolated surface finds.
The upper deposits belong to the Middle and Late Islamic periods. Beneath these, the excavators encountered earlier deposits which appear to belong to the fifth millennium BC.
Preliminary analysis associates them with the Middle and New Susa cultural traditions. Pottery and other cultural materials from these levels provide evidence for occupation during the sixth and fifth millennia BC and indicate that the location was already part of a settled landscape during the later Neolithic and early Chalcolithic.
This sequence is important for understanding what survives of the ancient settlement. The prehistoric occupation was apparently not preserved as a discrete archaeological mound standing apart from the later city.
Instead, subsequent construction and urban expansion have progressively incorporated, altered and in some areas destroyed the earlier landscape.
Historical aerial imagery provides an important complement to the excavated evidence. Photographs dating to 1335 in the Iranian calendar (1956–57) show an archaeological mound in the vicinity

of the caravanserai investigated by the team. The mound has since been substantially obscured or destroyed by urban construction.

The excavation evidence suggests that the surviving archaeological deposits represent remnants of this earlier settlement.

This relationship between buried deposits and the modern city also has implications for archaeological survey. Streets, houses and alleys of present-day Dehdasht occupy areas that correspond to the body of the former archaeological mound.

Consequently, determining the extent of the prehistoric site cannot depend solely on the identification of visible architectural remains. Instead, excavated cultural material and stratigraphic observations are being used to establish the archaeological extent and boundaries of the buried settlement.

The investigation also illustrates the value of approaching Dehdasht as a stratified archaeological landscape rather than simply as a historic architectural complex.

The Safavid buildings, Islamic-period deposits and prehistoric layers represent different moments within a single landscape, even though much of the physical evidence separating these periods has been altered by later occupation.

For archaeology, the importance of the recent work therefore extends beyond the identification of an early date. It demonstrates the potential for recovering prehistoric evidence from beneath an urban environment whose visible character belongs to much later periods. The discovery of such deposits beneath Beladshapur raises the possibility that other apparently historic elements of Dehdasht may similarly conceal earlier archaeological sequences.

The next stage of research will depend on the careful correlation of excavated deposits, material culture and the surviving archaeological landscape.

Such work can establish whether the prehistoric remains represent a limited settlement or a more extensive occupation and can place Dehdasht more securely within the regional archaeological sequence.

What is emerging is consequently not simply an older date for Dehdasht, but a new archaeological model for the site: a landscape repeatedly occupied, transformed and ultimately incorporated into the historic city.

Its deepest layers now offer an opportunity to investigate a phase of settlement that was invisible when Dehdasht was viewed primarily through its Safavid architectural heritage.

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Archaeologists Map a Lost Prehistoric Mound Beneath Dehdasht