It was around two o’clock on a mild mid-February afternoon that colleagues called head

archeologist Professor Yousef Madjidzadeh to look at some telltale markings in a dusty trench. It
was the last day of the six-week digging season at the Jiroft archeological site in the southeast
Iranian desert, and Madjidzadeh was jotting down notes before closing up for the year. The
Iranian-born archeologist, who has been excavating at Jiroft for two years, has become
increasingly convinced that the remains of this 4500-year-old city hold the key to a Bronze Age
kingdom whose existence promises to rewrite at least a chapter or two of the history of the
ancient Middle East.

“I took the pick in my hand and started to help dig out what turned out to be a remarkably
well-preserved stamp-seal impression,” Madjidzadeh recalls, now back at his home in the
Mediterranean port city of Nice, France.

Painstakingly extracting the five-centimeter- (2"-) long rectangle from the trench wall’s packed
clay, the archeologist turned it to the sunlight. Amid faintly inscribed lines and images of human
and animal figures, he was amazed to discover what appeared to be an unfamiliar form of
writing. To Madjidzadeh, the seal impression came as his first evidence that this ancient city’s
society was literate.

“To be able to say that Jiroft was a historic civilization, not a prehistoric one, is a great advance,”
he says. “Finding writing on that seal impression brought tears to my eyes. Never mind that we
can’t read it—that’ll come later.”

Though others have downplayed Madjidzadeh’s declarations that Jiroft was more than a regional
culture, archeologists generally agree, he says, that a distinct civilization is characterized by
unique monumental architecture and by its own form of writing. “This past winter, we found both,”
he beams.

Gray-bearded, easy-going and energetic in his mid-60’s, Madjidzadeh is feeling the glow of
vindication. A few years after Iran’s 1979 revolution, he was dismissed as chairman of the
department of archeology at Tehran University. After years of self-imposed exile in Nice with his
French-born wife, he returned during the intellectual thaw that followed the 1997 election of
President Mohammad Khatami.

The discovery of the Jiroft site came by accident. In 2000, flash floods along the Halil River swept
the topsoil off thousands of previously unknown tombs. Seyyed Mohammad Beheshti, deputy
head of Iran’s Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organization (ICHTO), asked Madjidzadeh to begin
excavations because of the archeologist’s long-standing bullishness on Jiroft’s significance.

As the author of a three-volume history of Mesopotamia and a leading Iranian authority on the
third millennium BC, Madjidzadeh has long hypothesized that Jiroft is the legendary land of
Aratta, a “lost” Bronze Age kingdom of renown. It’s a quest that he began as a doctoral candidate
at the University of Chicago, when in 1976 he published an article proposing that Aratta, which
reputedly exported its magnificent crafts to Mesopotamia, was located somewhere in
southeastern Iran.

According to texts dating from around 2100 BC, Aratta was a gaily decorated capital with a
citadel whose battlements were fashioned of green lapis lazuli and its lofty towers of bright red
brick. Aratta’s artistic production was so highly regarded that about 2500 BC the Sumerian king
Enmerkar sent a message to the ruler of Aratta requesting that artisans and architects be
dispatched to his capital, Uruk, to build a temple to honor Inanna, the goddess of fertility and war.
Enmerkar addressed his letter to Inanna: “Oh sister mine, make Aratta, for Uruk’s sake, skillfully
work gold and silver for me! (Make them cut for me) translucent lapis lazuli in blocks, (Make them
prepare for me) electrum and translucent lapis!” prayed the Sumerian ruler.

“When one imagines that Uruk was the heart of the Sumerian civilization and that its king is
asking another ruler about 2000 kilometers (1200 mi) distant to send his artisans, one realizes
that the quality of their work must have been extraordinary,” says Madjidzadeh. “The craftsmen
must have been known all over. Today there is no doubt in my mind that Jiroft was Aratta.” A
handful of colleagues agrees, including the French epigrapher François Vallat, who compares
Jiroft to the Elamite kingdom of southwestern Iran.

So far, however, there is no proof, and others are less sure.

“When you start reconstructing actual geographical regions based on legend and mythology,
you’re always in deep water,” says Abbas Alizadeh, an Iranian-born archeologist at the Oriental
Institute of the University of Chicago. “Some scholars think Aratta is in Azerbaijan. Others say
Baluchistan or the Persian Gulf. It’s a murky business.”

Yet even if Jiroft turns out not to be Aratta, it is nevertheless a pivotal clue to a better
understanding of the era when writing first flourished and traders carried spices and grain, gold,
lapis lazuli and ideas from the Nile to the Indus. Although not on a par with the more influential
civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus Valley, “Jiroft is obviously a very important
archeological complex,” says Holly Pittman, an art historian at the University of Pennsylvania
who is one of a growing number of non-Iranian scholars who are being allowed into the country.
“It’s an independent, autochthonous Bronze Age civilization with huge numbers of settlements of
all different sizes that we have only just begun to explore.” By comparison to the research
documenting other third-millennium civilizations, these are indeed very early days, she explains.
“We don’t yet have enough material to compare it to Mesopotamia. But you have to remember
that 500 teams of archeologists have been digging in Mesopotamia for 100 years. In Jiroft, we’ve
had two seasons with one team of fewer than 30 scientists.”

Even so, among the spectacular finds so far are the remains of a city a kilometer and a half (.92
mi) in diameter, an unusual two-story citadel surrounded by a fortress wall 10.5 meters (34')
thick, and a ziggurat resembling Sumerian ones that is among the largest in the ancient
world—17 meters (54') high and 400 meters (1280') on each side at the base. The team has also
uncovered 25 stamp and cylinder seal impressions from two to five centimeters (7/8"–2") long
that depict bulls, ibex, lions, snakes, human figures—and writing.

Perhaps the most impressive discoveries have been staggering numbers of carved and
decorated vases, cups, goblets and boxes made of a soft, fine-grained, durable gray-greenish
stone called chlorite. Literally tens of thousands of pieces have been found, but the vast majority
have been looted from their original tombs by local farmers, who were the first to stumble across
the gargantuan honeycomb of gravesites uncovered by the floodwaters of 2000.

“Thousands of people were digging,” Madjidzadeh explains, and antiquities dealers swooped in
behind them to buy up the finds by the dozens. Farmers often sold chlorite vases worth tens of
thousands of dollars on the international market for a few sacks of flour. Ultimately, in the fall of
2002, the Iranian authorities stepped in to halt the looting and seize hundreds of contraband
artifacts.

Major archeological sites from the fourth

and third millennia BC.

Chlorite vessels similar to the stunning examples recently

unearthed at Jiroft in southeastern Iran have been found
from the Euphrates to the Indus, as far north as the Amu
Darya and as far south as Tarut Island, on the Persian Gulf
coast of Saudi Arabia. Iranian-born archeologist Professor
Yousef Madjidzadeh speculates that some of these objects
were in fact imported from Jiroft, which he is convinced is
the legendary third-millennium-BC city of Aratta. Other
archeologists, however, dispute this conclusion, maintaining
that the vases, bowls and cups from Mesopotamian and
Indus Valley sites were manufactured locally. What is clear
is that Jiroft traders brought lapis lazuli from Afghanistan
and carnelian from the Indus to decorate the ornate vessels
they manufactured.

The Jiroft artifacts are a “missing link” in understanding the Bronze Age, Madjidzadeh says,
because they help explain why so many incised chlorite vessels, all with remarkably similar
imagery, have turned up at widely separated ancient sites, from Mari in Syria to Nippur and Ur in
Mesopotamia, Soch in Uzbekistan and the Saudi Arabian island of Tarut, north of Bahrain. Until
now, the principal center of production of these vessels was a mystery. Although some of them
were probably manufactured locally, the sheer volume of artifacts at Jiroft argues that the most
prolific chlorite workshops of all were there. (See sidebar, page 8.)
Jiroft artisans fashioned pieces with what seems strange and enigmatic iconography. Some were
encrusted with lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, carnelian from the Indus Valley, turquoise, agate and
other semiprecious, imported stones. “The artists had such a naturalistic way of rendering
images,” says Madjidzadeh. “It is a style that was not seen anywhere else in that era.

“There must certainly have been a school of stonecarvers, because you see such an aesthetic
unity of these objects throughout the kingdom. This high-level artistic quality did not suddenly
appear from nowhere,” he maintains. “The traditions must have taken 300 to 400 years to
develop.”

Carved into one gray chlorite cup, mythic creatures with human heads and torsos and bulls’ legs
hold panthers upside-down by their tails. On the surface of a stone weight shaped roughly like a
ladies’ handbag, two horned scorpion-men appear to swim toward each other. “Hunters who
were believed to be as powerful as bulls or as agile as lions entered into legend, and their
images became animalized as bull-men and lion-men,” the archeologist suggests in explanation.

Round chlorite boxes are decorated with representations of curved gates, woven reed walls,
ziggurats and other architectural details that hint at what Jiroft’s buried buildings probably looked
like.
 rom the middle to the late third
millennium BC, vases, bowls and cups
made of chlorite were traded
throughout the area shown on the map
above. Similar to steatite and
soapstone, the mineral was valued by
artisans because it was durable but
soft enough to carve easily and
fine-grained enough to hold carved
details well. Its color ranged from jade
green (from which came its
Greek-derived name) to smoky gray,
with some pieces nearly as black as
obsidian.

Although abundant chlorite deposits

are scattered across Iran and the Hajar
Mountains of the United Arab Emirates,
archeologists have so far uncovered
ancient chlorite quarries and
workshops in only two locations: at
Tepe Yahya in the Kerman province of
southeastern Iran and at Tarut, where
some 600 intact vessels and fragments
were unearthed. It is still unclear where
the raw material for the chlorite objects
found in Sumeria originated, and
similarly, the chlorite mines at Jiroft
remain elusive.

Along with the chlorite objects are also pink and orange alabaster jars, white marble vases,
copper figurines, beakers and a striking copper basin with a eagle seated in its center, as well as
realistic carved stone impressions of heraldic eagles, scorpions and scorpion-women.

Many of the scenes on the Jiroft vessels bear a strong resemblance to the gods, beasts and
plants portrayed on Sumerian statues, plaques and cylinder seals. “Jiroft leads me to imagine
that Iran had a far greater influence on Mesopotamian culture than I previously thought,”
observes Jean Perrot, the grand old man of Middle Eastern archeology in France.

To Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky of Harvard University, who excavated a site named Tepe Yahya
some 90 kilometers (50 mi) from Jiroft in the 1970’s, what is particularly remarkable about the
Jiroft finds is that so many thousands of brand-new, empty chlorite vessels were manufactured
for no other apparent purpose than to be buried in tombs to honor the dead. “The fact that not a
single one of them contains even a trace of oils, perfumes, foodstuffs or drugs, nor shows any
other sign of use, is very curious,” he marvels.

Despite the crackdown on pillaging and the hiring of a dozen armed guards, theft at Jiroft still
continues. This winter, while working on the city mounds, Madjidzadeh received a tip that looters
were digging at gravesites six kilometers (3.7 mi) away. Racing to the cemetery with one of the
guards, he caught sight of several dozen looters, who escaped on foot when they saw
Madjidzadeh coming. One of his laborers later told him that it was rumored the looters had
managed to spirit away a priceless golden fish figure. One looted gravesite reportedly yielded an
astonishing 200 artifacts, including 30 finely crafted chlorite vessels.

“Was it the tomb of the lord of Aratta?” asks Madjidzadeh sadly. “Because all the objects were
ripped out of context and have disappeared, we’ll never know—even if they turn up in the
antiquities market.”

On his days off, the archeologist travels to surrounding villages to give lectures about the
significance of Jiroft and its irreplaceable artifacts.

“I show photos of the objects and our excavations and tell the villagers in simple language that all
these works belonged to your grandparents, your ancestors,” he explains. “‘They are your
heritage. You don’t sell your heritage. If we put these cups and vases in a museum, they will
attract tourists. This will bring more money than selling the pieces once or twice. You and your
children will benefit from the tourists and education.’ Little by little, people understand more about
the cultural value of the finds.”

On the international art market, it’s a different story. Museums and private collectors have been
quick to recognize the cultural, esthetic and, in particular, monetary worth of artifacts that
Madjidzadeh is sure were stolen from Jiroft.

“I scour the Internet, auction catalogues and brochures and have been shocked to see museums
in Switzerland, Japan, Turkey, Pakistan and elsewhere buying these objects,” he says. Protecting
Jiroft is an overwhelming task, for Madjidzadeh and his team have uncovered more than 250
separate sites across an area about the size of Austria or South Carolina. In the forested
mountains 150 kilometers (90 mi) north of Jiroft, other archeologists have discovered copper
mines that likely produced the ore for the copper and bronze artifacts unearthed in Jiroft’s
gravesites. But so far, no one has pinpointed the chlorite mines.

French geomorphologist Éric Fouache, the team’s expert on reading the strata underlying the
archeological sites, has discovered something else, however, which gave the Jiroft region a
crucial advantage over Mesopotamia: water. A network of artesian wells supplied abundant water
for irrigation and drinking even when the Halil River ran dry. With these sources of water, the
inhabitants developed an agriculture based on calorie-rich date palms rather than the cereals of
the Tigris and Euphrates delta, says Fouache. Palm groves also provided shade for extensive
gardening.

“So it’s very possible the Jiroft people developed agriculture more easily than the
Mesopotamians,” asserts the scientist.
Next year, Fouache plans on probing deeper to locate earlier remains buried by the region’s
frequent tectonic upheavals. “Based on aerial photographs showing traces of past ground shifts,
we expect to find older settlements not visible from the surface,” he says.

The primary Jiroft site consists of two mounds a couple of kilometers apart, called Konar Sandal
A and B and measuring 13 and 21 meters high (41' and 67'), respectively. It was at Konar Sandal
B that the archeologists dug out the seal impressions bearing writing. So far, the archeologists
have excavated around nine vertical meters (28') of Konar Sandal B, discovering vestiges of a
monumental, two-story, windowed citadel whose base covers nearly 13.5 hectares (33 acres).
Madjidzadeh speculates that this imposing edifice once housed the city’s chief administrative
center and perhaps a temple and a royal palace.

Finding the structure’s façade was difficult enough, but locating an entrance took the team weeks
of digging through clay packed hard by millennia of rain-wash. “The mud is like stone,”
Madjidzadeh complains. “You can hardly get a pick into it.”

This winter they stumbled across what appears to be the city’s main gateway, a squared-off
earthen portal that closely resembles architectural details depicted on several chlorite vases. The
team has also uncovered a second wall and vestiges of a third, with trenches exposing both
private houses and another sizeable public building—perhaps a trading center.

“We know it’s another monumental building because the bricks are larger than the bricks used in
private homes,” says Madjidzadeh.

According to the archeologist, the enormous ziggurat at Konar Sandal A was a tremendous feat
of engineering that required four to five million bricks. Like its Sumerian counterparts, it was
probably a sacred structure, a bridge between earth and sky, and it was probably topped by a
room where the city’s protective god could woo his mortal consort, usually the wife or daughter of
the ruler.

Although very little is known of the beliefs and rituals of Jiroft’s inhabitants, Madjidzadeh is
convinced that the practice of burying the dead with a relative fortune in artifacts points to a
well-organized religion with a priestly class that could command the efforts of craftsmen. Since
the ancient Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh mentions scorpion-men similar to ones carved on
Jiroft’s stone vases, the archeologist also suggests that parts of the Gilgamesh narrative
circulated in Jiroft and may even have had their origins there. Another of the recent season’s top
finds was the discovery by Marjan Mashkur, an Iranian researcher based in Paris, of shark bones
and shells from the Persian Gulf, 200 kilometers (120 mi) south. To Madjidzadeh, this find
confirms that Jiroft merchants plied well-worn trade routes that led to the Persian Gulf and on to
Mesopotamia, dealing in chlorite vessels, lapis lazuli and other precious stones, and
commodities fabricated in Jiroft.

Even at this relatively early stage, Madjidzadeh believes he has enough evidence to turn some of
the fundamental precepts of Middle Eastern archeology on their head. The fabulous royal
treasure excavated in the 1920’s by Leonard Wooley at the Sumerian capital of Ur, including the
iconic, shell-encrusted ibex standing to nibble the leaves of a gold tree, may ultimately be traced
back to the workshops of Jiroft, he says. So might chlorite vessels from Uruk, Mari and Soch.
“We’re not sure what gold pieces might have come from Jiroft,” says Pittman, “but some of the
chlorite pieces in Mesopotamia may well prove to have been exported from this region of
southeastern Iran.”

“Three years ago, I would have agreed with the common assertion that Mesopotamia was the
cradle of civilization,” Madjidzadeh says. “Now I’m changing my mind to Jiroft, which, in its
heyday, was just as important and as extensive as Sumerian civilization.”

For some in the field, this comparison sets off alarm bells.

Lamberg-Karlovsky is one of the skeptics. While the Harvard professor acknowledges the
importance of the discovery of Jiroft and its chlorite vessels, he warns against hyperbole. “To
imply that Jiroft is the most ancient Oriental civilization is way off the mark,” he argues. “In terms
of actual material recovered so far, there is nothing earlier than 2500 BC, which is a thousand
years later than the southern Mesopotamian world.”

Madjidzadeh, however, maintains that pottery found at Jiroft compares to shards from Tepe
Yahya dated to 2800 BC. In addition, he reasons, it would have taken nearly half a millennium for
Jiroft’s artisans to develop the degree of skill that attracted King Enmerkar’s envy in 2500 BC, an
inference that pushes back the establishment of Jiroft to about 3000 BC. Unfortunately, carbon
dating of the vases and pots—the most reliable technique for gauging the age of artifacts—is not
possible at Jiroft, since there have been absolutely no traces of organic residue in any of the
materials unearthed so far. The Harvard archeologist and others deprecate Madjidzadeh’s
contention. “These are very tenuous conclusions,” says Lamberg-Karlovsky. “To try to put Jiroft
on the same level as the Sumerian, Egyptian and Indus Valley civilizations, or even as the
Bactrian material of central Asia, is to exaggerate and distort the archeological record. Jiroft is
just not in the same ballpark.”

Based on his own chemical analyses of chlorite pieces from Tarut, Mesopotamia and elsewhere,
Lamberg-Karlovsky states that the stone finds in those places were mined locally. He is thus
wary of claims that Jiroft pottery was widely exported.

“It’s very significant that Jiroft was the center of production for huge numbers of chlorite vessels,
but to say that the vessels found in Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula and the Iranian plateau
came from Jiroft is patently false,” he declares.

Madjidzadeh counters that chlorite vessels may indeed have been produced elsewhere—but by
itinerant artisans and stonecutters originally from Jiroft or local craftsmen imitating Jiroft styles.

For Rémy Boucharlat, chief of the French Center for Scientific Research in Tehran, it’s possible
that Jiroft exported chlorite vessels to Mesopotamia and beyond. “Yet we still don’t know if the
Mesopotamians carved their own imagery on unfinished stone or whether the iconography
originated in Jiroft,” he says.

The Oriental Institute’s Alizadeh agrees that Jiroft artisans could well have traveled to
Mesopotamia and other areas in the Middle East, but he too deflates some of Madjidzadeh’s
more grandiose claims, including the assertion that Jiroft’s civilization predates Sumer’s. After
examining the writing on the seal impression uncovered in February, the Chicago archeologist
now doubts its authenticity. Compared to the sophisticated systems of writing that already existed
in the region by 2500 BC, the Jiroft artifact presents “an extremely vague series of scratches,” he
says.

“There’s great excitement about Jiroft because of the prodigious number of chlorite vessels found
there, but the problem is that we don’t know anything about the makers of these objects,” argues
Alizadeh. “What is significant is the similarity to designs found in Elamite culture, but to call Jiroft
a civilization is not exactly true at this point. Possessing a major manufacturing workshop does
not qualify the site as a civilization.”

Perhaps more exciting than the beautiful chlorite bowls, vases and cups, which after all reveal
little information about the ancient inhabitants of Jiroft, says Boucharlat, are the newly excavated
settlements and buildings. “We’re now entering a second phase of discoveries, one that goes
beyond fine objects to a knowledge of the culture and its relatively high level of social
organization and technical proficiency,” he explains.

Regardless of what impact the site ultimately makes on Middle Eastern archeology, there is no
doubt that Jiroft is serving as a pilot program for Iranian professors and graduate students to
work alongside international—mainly American and French—colleagues.

“Before the 1979 revolution, there was tremendous collaboration between Iranian and foreign
archeologists,” notes Pittman, who first came to excavate in Iran more than 25 years ago. “We’re
trying to pick up where we left off.”

As Madjidzadeh explains, “One of my conditions for inviting foreign archeologists to participate at

Jiroft is that they accept Iranian students for training at their universities to learn updated
techniques and western methods of teaching.” Now, however, the obstacles to such exchanges
are not only on the Iranian side. Despite the University of Pennsylvania’s eagerness to train
Iranian researchers, the US government has so far refused to grant them visas.

“It’s immensely frustrating,” Pittman admits. “Until the geopolitical fireworks calm down a bit,
we’re not going to have any luck training them here in the us. And training the next generation of
archeologists is the most urgent need by far for the country’s heritage.”

With more archeologists, Iran could again become a hotspot for the study of ancient civilizations.
Certainly Madjidzadeh, who earns less in Iran than a skilled laborer does in France and who
pays his own airfares between Nice and Tehran, is not in his profession for money. Ironically for
an archeologist once hounded out of the country, local officials in the town of Jiroft are planning
to name a square after him.

“I go to Iran because I love archeology and I love to help the nation,” he says. “It’s a part of my
life I could never change even if I wanted to.”
You wouldn’t think that 6000-year-old bones and pottery shards would wow a bunch of
20-year-olds. But then you wouldn’t be reckoning with the archeology students at Shiraz
University.

“I felt like a celebrity,” marvels Abbas Alizadeh. After a two-hour lecture to an auditorium
packed with students and locals, the Iranian-born archeology professor from the Oriental
Institute of the University of Chicago was besieged by questioners. “Finally, I had to
escape,” he laughs. Alizadeh, who in 2001 pioneered renewed Iranian-us archeological
ties, has witnessed firsthand the new surge to research and protect Iran’s 10 millennia of
cultural heritage. It’s an urgent push that comes just in time. As the country’s population
grows exponentially, monuments are being threatened by agricultural expansion and the
roaring pace of industrial development.

“The Iranian economy is growing fast,” says Massoud Azarnoush, head of the Iranian
Center for Archaeological Research in Tehran. “New dams, irrigation networks, highways,
railroads and factories are under construction everywhere. Once-remote areas are
becoming accessible to development and agriculture, which are proving a serious
menace to archeological remains.”

Although some 20,000 ruins are listed with the national center, Azarnoush estimates that
the real total should be at least 10 times that—a staggering 200,000 historically significant
archeological sites scattered around a nation the size of Alaska, or three times the size of
France. It’s a heritage on a par with Egypt, Turkey or China. The sites range from tiny
settlements and cemeteries to sprawling cities like Persepolis, capital of the Achaemenid
kings, and the earthen citadel at Arg-e-Bam that in December 2003 was devastated by an
earthquake.

Today, Tehran devotes some $20 million annually to archeology, according to Azarnoush,
and it recently issued directives requiring building projects to avoid damaging
archeological remains. “In many cases, we’ve succeeded in protecting uncovered sites
and relocating highways, rail lines and dams,” he points out.

Still, there are thousands of sites at risk. Leading the list are extensive Elamite and
Sassanian finds threatened by sugar-cane farming in Khuzestan province and pre-Bronze
Age settlements at Tepe Pardis, on the outskirts of Tehran, whose bricks are being
cannibalized for housing.

Other sites, like Jiroft, suffer rampant looting fueled by demand from international
museums and collectors. “Of course, Iran is trying to stop this trafficking, but when
museums with huge resources buy the objects, it doesn’t matter how much protection you
have for the sites,” Azarnoush complains. Although the country’s chief monuments have
armed guards, remote areas are patrolled by the “Guardians of Cultural Heritage,” an
informal brigade of around 10,000 unarmed volunteers who report thefts to local police.

Key to reducing looting is public education similar to the efforts of Jiroft’s Yousef
Madjidzadeh, together with a campaign to open up ongoing digs to visits from local
residents and foreign tourists so they can see what a proper job looks like, and appreciate
the emerging heritage.

“One of the first things we did at Bam after the earthquake was to create a passage
through the ruins to permit visitors to see the damage to the citadel,” says Azarnoush.
And after some 25 years of isolation, the Islamic Republic is letting international teams
back into the country, thanks in large part to Azarnoush and Seyyed Mohammad
Beheshti, deputy head of the Iranian Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organization (ICHTO).
In August 2003, the government invited some 40 scholars, including professors from
Harvard University, the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, to tour
important sites and negotiate shared excavations.

“The Iranians are doing an outstanding job preserving some major monuments,
undertaking new site surveys and trying hard to control looting,” observes Harvard’s Carl
Lamberg-Karlovsky, who is now working with local archeologists at Bronze Age sites in
the Atrak river valley near the border with Turkmenistan. “But this rebirth of international
cooperation is immensely welcome. Isolation kills science.”

The key to the new agreements is that an equal number of Iranians and foreigners
participate in the digs. “Under the Shah, outside expeditions came in, did their research
and left,” Azarnoush explains. “There was virtually no scientific benefit for Iranians.”

Now, a team sponsored by the German Archaeological Institute is exploring copper mines
from the fourth millennium BC discovered near Isfahan; Japanese archeologists are
surveying the third-century city of Jalaliyeh; French researchers are poring over remains
of Cyrus the Great’s fifth-century-BC capital at Pasagardae near Persepolis; and
scientists from the University of Sydney are unearthing finds from second-millennium-BC
Elamite sites near the Iraqi border.

For Azarnoush, who earned his doctorate from the University of California at Los Angeles,
the decades of isolation proved an accidental boon in at least one respect.

“It forced us to become more self-reliant,” he maintains. “Now we are better able to
negotiate excavation terms on a more equal basis. We desperately need these outside
collaborations in order to modernize our research and persuade our overly traditional
archeologists that they have to broaden their teamwork with paleozoologists,
paleobotanists, physicists and other branches of science.” Under these academic joint
ventures, Iranians and foreigners also will cooperate on post-excavation conservation
plans and bilingual publication of results, he adds.

Last May, in a gesture of goodwill, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago
returned to Tehran 300 ancient Persian clay tablets that had been unearthed in the
1930’s. It was the first batch of several thousand cuneiform tablets that will be repatriated
after the Institute finishes photographing them for a digital inventory.

Since the Oriental Institute’s Alizadeh first began traveling back to Iran in the mid-1990’s,
he has begun to help set up an archeobiological laboratory in Tehran to house bones and
seeds from various sites around the country. Earlier, he salvaged thousands of pottery
shards that had lain underwater for decades in the cellars of a museum in Tehran, and
created a databank to catalog them. He is training young archeologists to establish
mini-databanks for the network of 52 regional research centers at principal excavations
around the country.

What has struck the Chicago professor most during his time back in Iran is the insatiable
hunger of students to pursue archeology despite the shortages of professors, equipment
and training materials. “Even though I warn them they are going to be unemployed for a
long time, maybe forever, they say they love it and won’t give up,” he explains. “It’s both
sad and encouraging.”