From December 16 to 18, an online conference will take place as part of the DFG Priority Program 2176 “The Iranian Highlands: Resilience and Integration in Pre-Modern Societies.”

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This three-day online conference, organized as part of the DFG Priority Program 2176 “The Iranian Highlands: Resilience and Integration in Pre-Modern Societies,” examines how humans have shaped, transformed, and inhabited the landscapes of the Iranian highlands over the millennia. The event builds on two complementary perspectives:

• Landscape archaeology, which views the landscape not as a passive backdrop but as an archive of human activity. It examines spatial patterns, infrastructures, ecological traces, and material remains as interconnected signatures that provide insight into how societies have organized themselves in relation to their environment.
• Anthropogenic landscapes, which are shaped by human activity, whether through deliberate interventions such as irrigation, terracing, and mining, or through unintended consequences such as erosion, deforestation, and soil changes. These landscapes reflect both everyday adaptations and long-term changes.

By bringing together archaeologists and scientists from related disciplines, the conference seeks to trace the dynamic interaction between humans and their environment. This interaction did not unfold as a simple chain of cause and effect, but through complex feedback loops. With the help of modern analytical tools such as GIS, spatial modeling, and remote sensing, 

we aim to follow the material traces of these processes in order to understand how communities attempted to make the highlands habitable and how they used and managed resources.

The Iranian highlands, with their diverse topography, sensitive ecology, and shifting political boundaries, offer a particularly rich setting for such investigations. Over the course of three days, this conference will serve as a forum to examine how intentional and unintentional changes have shaped the cultural landscapes we find today. The sessions will be streamed via the open-source platform BigBlueButton, with sections for presentations and discussion panels. The event is free of charge and open to scholars, students, and anyone interested in the long-term dynamics of human-environment interactions in the Iranian highlands.

We warmly welcome all participants to this online workshop and look forward to three days of presentations and discussions.

💻 Click here to register 💻