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E-book The Archaeology of Iran from the Palaeolithic to the Achaemenid Empire
At the same time, archaeologists, anthropologists and historians have begun to explore the deep-time origins and early development of social inequality, articulating trends and patterns through analysis of material attributes such as size and complexity of household dwellings, access to storage space and variation in quantity and type of grave goods, on the basis that the pervasiveness of inequality across much of the world today (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009) can only be understood through historical understanding of how we got here: “Inequalities develop through historical processes that operate on many levels, from the individual to the society, from the kin group and neighbourhood to the state” (Smith et al. 2018: 5; Fochesato et al. 2019). Again, the past of Iran provides a wealth of case studies with which to investigate issues of social inequality within the context of trajectories of change and continuity across millennia. Many of the earliest written records of Mesopotamia and Iran, dating from c. 3200 BC onwards, are concerned with the administration of slaves, male and female, adult and child, who were put to work on massive state projects or exchanged as gifts amongst the dynastic urban elite groups residing in the cities and palaces of southern Iraq and south-western Iran (Bartash 2020). How significant was the role of slave labour in the development of early Iranian societies, and how can we deploy archaeology to assist in understanding early steps in the development of social inequalities?1The archaeology of early Iran: perspectives from the past for the present? Along with Iran’s neighbour to the west, Iraq or ancient Mesopotamia, it is hard to name another country of the contemporary world that, on the basis of what we already know about its past, can contribute such rich and detailed historically contingent case-studies with which to inform and address these global challenges and issues, all of which can be framed within a discourse of deep-time perspectives on planetary sustainability (Satterwhite et al. 2016), the single most urgent and important research field across today’s academic disciplines.
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