Traces of prehistorical settlement revealed in northwest Iran

INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
overlapped with the termination of the Iron Age.The team is one of the five currently conducting rescue excavations on the basin of a newly
Monday.Preliminary estimates show the beginning of the settlement can coincide with the end of the Iron Age, the archaeologist
said.Measuring 50 by 100 meters in area, the settlement is built on a natural ridge with a northeast-southwest expansion, Fallahian said.He
said the exposed architecture consisted of ruins made of small and large rubbles with mud mortar, which do not have much resistance and
stability.Referring to the discovered relics, he said the cultural materials discovered at the site included many pottery pieces and a
handful of relatively flawless earthen vessels, all of which are simple, and a large number of them are observed to be brittle and rough,
which is probably from local and non-mass production.Moreover, the abundant use of stones indicates the way of life at the settlement, which
was mainly based on agriculture and animal breeding, he said.The ruins may be remnants of barracks due to the special position of the
settlement, which overlooks a surrounding plain and the existence of thick outer walls
However, a clearer answer to this hypothesis requires more and more extensive excavations at the site,Earlier this month, his coworkers
found arrays of relics estimated to date some 7,000 years near Sufian Hill of Oshnavieh county.During these archaeological excavations, more
than three and a half meters of [soil] accumulation related to the 5th millennium BC was identified, which adds to our knowledge of human
civilization in that era, the archaeologist said.Surrounded by towering mountains, Oshnavieh lies on a thick layer cake of civilizations
that emerged and disappeared over millennia
Moreover, it boasts some 100 sites registered on the national cultural heritage list.Oshnavieh is sometimes reffered to as an
of archaeologists and even illegal excavators to the region.The Urartu kingdom rose to power in the mid-9th century BC, but it went into a
gradual decline and was eventually conquered by the Iranian Medes in the early 6th century BC
The Urartians were succeeded in the area in the 6th century BC by the Armenians.Urartu was an ancient country of southwest Asia centered in
the mountainous region southeast of the Black Sea and southwest of the Caspian Sea
Today the region is divided among Armenia, eastern Turkey, and northwestern Iran
As mentioned in Assyrian sources from the early 13th century BC, Urartu enjoyed considerable political power in the Middle East in the 9th
and 8th centuries BC.AFM