The season will reportedly seek to reconstruct climate and provide a sedimentology profile of the region to delve deep into the mechanisms at work in formation of the site and develop a definitive chronological timeline of the region, Iran’s Cultural Heritage Research Center public relations office said.
As Hamed Vahdatinasab, a Tarbiat Modarress University professor and the director of the exploration team told Mehr News, a group of experts of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Center for Scientific Research), a French center, cooperated in the exploration.
“The 5-year plan is an attempt to cast new light on the less explored and dark angles of Iran’s Paleolithic times of this part of the geography through examinations in north of central desert via excavations in Mirak archeological site,” Vahdatinasab told Mehr News.
He said that Mirak and Delazian sites, which were known as Mirak and Delazian hills, were explored for the first time in Semnan archeological investigations in 1985.
“Apart from the hills’ shape, the most striking feature of the sites are the sheer vastness of the spread of stone tools on the surface, which attracted the attention of the team, and which triggered invitation of late Mr. Enayatollah Amirlou for an extensive Paleolithic investigation,” he said.
“With the untimely death of Mr. Amirlou, the Paleolithic significance of Mirak and Delazian remained in abeyance, and only a single structure tracing back to Median era was uncovered during excavation in one of Delazian’s hills; in 2008, a random sampling was carried out on Delazian, and the results of a preliminary research was presented to ICAANE (International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East), in Sapienza University of Rome,” Vahdatinasab added. “Only after that in 2009 did a permission allow complete exploration of Mirak and Delazian sites in a more methodical and systematic manner for a month for sampling and categorization of the remains uncovered.”
Vahdatinasab also held that preliminary estimations indicated hundreds of thousands of rock fragments on the surface; “from a chronological point of view, and given the presence of indicators of different Paleolithic eons, Mirak hosted the largest settlements during Middle Paleolithic (250,000-40,000 years ago) and also during Neo-Paleolithic (40,000-18,000 years ago),” he detailed.
“With paleolithic investigations underway in north of central desert, in 2013, the exploration group also managed preparation of an archeological report on a second vast site called Soufiabad, south of Sorkheh, which rivaled Mirak in terms of scope and the diversity of ancient remains; in summer of 2014, the group led an expedition to southern parts of Damghan and the vicinity of Chah Jam desert, to test the hypotheses on Paleolithic settlements on the coasts of ancient lakes of the region,” Vahdatinasab accounted.
“3 weeks of field work culminated in the discovery of Chah Jam Paleolithic site which spreads in an area of 9 square kilometers; the site hosts a diversity of middle Paleolithic arrow heads,” he told Mehr News.
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