Archaeologists Map 500,000-Year-Old Paleolithic Site in Sarakhs

Date: 01 June 2026 - 21:56

News ID: ۱۵۰۵۶۸

TEHRAN -- Iranian archaeologists have completed a systematic trenching and boundary survey of the Qarah Sanghi prehistoric site in Sarakhs county, a significant Paleolithic complex that may reshape understanding of early human dispersal across the Iranian plateau.
The site, registered as a national heritage asset in 2025 after its identification in 2023, spans approximately 100 hectares along a river corridor in northeastern Razavi Khorasan province. It represents one of the largest open-air Paleolithic localities in eastern Iran – a category that, unlike caves or rock shelters, presents acute challenges for heritage protection.
Mahmoud Toghrai, head of the registration and historic boundaries department at the provincial cultural heritage directorate, announced the completion of fieldwork on Monday. The excavation and surveying permit was issued by the country’s Archaeological Research Institute and led by archaeologist Ali Sadraei.
“Qarah Sanghi is among the most important Paleolithic sites in northeastern Iran,” Sadraei said.
Because the site is open-air – scattered across a landscape rather than contained within a cave system – defining its legal boundaries has required painstaking surface collection, gridded surveying and high-resolution mapping.
The team has identified multiple occupation phases spanning the Pleistocene epoch. The oldest lithic assemblages suggest hominin presence as early as 500,000 years ago.
Evidence of Acheulean bifacial technology – a hallmark of Lower Paleolithic toolmaking – has been recovered alongside Levallois method flakes from the Middle Paleolithic and microlithic geometric tools from the Upper Paleolithic, indicating discontinuous human presence down to roughly 12,000 years ago.
“These sequences are not uniform across the site,” Sadrāei noted. “Some areas show only Lower and Middle Paleolithic material. But taken together,

Qarah Sanghi is one of the oldest documented human habitation locations on the Iranian plateau.”

The survey also produced a detailed damage assessment, recording natural erosion, agricultural encroachment and infrastructure pressures.

Toghrai thanked the Sarakhs governor’s office, the regional water authority and the border regiment for facilitating access – a reminder that much of this landscape lies in a sensitive frontier zone near Iran’s border with Turkmenistan.

Legally, the work serves two purposes. First, to establish a precise protected perimeter around the site, giving it standing under Iran’s heritage protection laws. Second, to create a baseline for future geoarchaeological and palaeoenvironmental research – studies that could place northeast Iran more firmly within debates about early human migration corridors between Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Zagros mountains.