TEHRAN–A senior Iranian archaeologist has underlined the need for conducting preliminary work aimed to pave the way for possible registration of Tepe Ozbaki, a 9,000-year-old site, situated some 80 km from Tehran.

Credited with extensive Iron Age studies, Mostafa Dehpahlavan called for conducting supplementary and comparative excavations at the site, IRIB reported on Friday.

Moreover, Dehpahlavan, who presides over the Research Institute of Cultural Heritage and Tourism, demanded work to spotlight the site’s findings.

Dehpahlavan made the remarks on the sidelines of a visit to the site, the report said.

The eighth season of excavation on the site began on August 23 and is still underway to throw new light on the history of human settlement at the site.

So far, the hill site has yielded cultural relics dating from the first half of the 7th millennium to the first half of the first millennium BC, i.e. the Medes period.

Experts suggest that the discovery of certain objects in the hill indicates some kind of commercial links to Susa in the Khuzestan region, southwest Iran.

The discovery of objects such as tablets, statuettes, and ‘jagged’ earthenware in the hill indicates some kind of commercial link between Susa in Khuzestan and this in Tehran province, according to senior Iranian archaeologist Yousef Majidzadeh who has led excavations at Ozbaki, Qabristan, and Jiroft hills.

According to the available data, the first well-documented evidence of human habitation on the Iranian Plateau was found in several excavated cave and rock shelters, located mainly in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran, dating to the Middle Palaeolithic or Mousterian period (c. 100,000 BC).

From the Caspian in the northwest to Baluchestan in the southeast, the Iranian plateau extends for close to 2,000 km. The land encompasses the greater part of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan west of the Indus River, containing some 3,700,000 square kilometers. Despite being called a “plateau”, it is far from flat but contains several mountain ranges, the highest peak being Damavand in the Alborz mountain range at 5610 m, and the Dasht-e Loot east of Kerman in Central Iran, falling below 300 m.

AFM