TEHRAN – Iran’s cultural heritage ministry seeks to map legal boundaries for Konar-Sandal, which is a treasured Bronze Age site situated near a rural village of the same name in southern Iran.

“Proximity of the ancient site to the Kanaar Sandal village has caused restrictions for its residents and developmental programs in the region,” a ministerial director said on Sunday.

“We have plans to [determine and] legalize boundaries for Konar Sandal to reduce people's problems to an extent that the site will remain safe,” Alireza Izadi said.

He said the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicraft has no plan to relocate the residents, adding: “Those problems can be solved by determining legal boundaries for the ancient site.”

According to local experts, such a demarcation is preliminary to preparing for a possible UNESCO label.

Konar Sandal was once one of the most important Bronze Age cities in Southwest Asia, said Fereidoun Fa'ali, the provincial tourism chief.

The first archaeological excavation on the site was conducted some two decades ago by a team of international experts under the leadership of Iranian archaeologist Yousef Majidzadeh, he said.

Situated in the archaeologically rich Jiroft plain of Kerman province, the site comprises two mounds, called Konar Sandal A and B with a height of 13 and 21 meters, respectively. The mounts have yielded arrays of ruins and relics, such as tablets with scripts of unknown nature, and a two-story, windowed citadel with a base of close to 13.5 hectares.

Jiroft remained forgotten until the very early 21st century when rounds of heavy flood along the Halil River swept the topsoil off thousands of previously unknown tombs and led to the discovery of many artifacts believed by archeologists to belong to the Early Bronze Age (late 3rd millennium BC). The earliest rumors exposed: “An old object was seen floating on the surface of the water.” Realizing it was precious, the following day, villagers, impoverished by two years of drought, swarmed the river banks in search of 5,000-year-old antiquities.

Most probably, geological factors made it overlooked for years by tourists and archeologists, who have generally been more interested in Mesopotamia some 1,000 km away.

Madjidzadeh and his team of experts uncovered more than two square kilometers of remains from a city dating back to at least the late 3rd millennium B.C. The data demonstrates that Jiroft’s heyday was from 2500 BC to 2200 BC. Astonishingly the chlorite vases found in Jiroft were not an unfamiliar object for the archeologists. Chlorite vessels similar to the stunning examples unearthed at Jiroft had 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.

The archaeologist trusts that Jiroft artifacts are a “missing link” in understanding the Bronze Age 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.

AFM