Patterns of Land-Use and Political Administration Beyond the Core Areas of the Sasanian Empire

Summary

The landscapes of the Sasanian Empire have long been viewed as massive and state-sponsored development projects, in particular in politically and economically core zones. Despite these unparalleled understandings, our knowledge of peripheries and their connection with the sociopolitical organization of the time have still remained as some of the key gaps in the studies of late antiquity. To address these questions, I examine the settlement expansion, water management systems and agricultural intensification along the Sirwan/Diyala River in the Kurdistan Region. With the application of satellite images for landscape classification, GIS-based hydrological modeling, proxy records to reconstruct the climatic conditions, and combined with results of archaeological fieldwork, this paper offers that a bottom-up approach to intensification will shed new light on the role of local communities and the degree of their autonomy. It presents that large-scale projects and dependence on the centralized political authority were not always agriculturally required and a different intensification strategy with the integration of both irrigation and rain-fed practices could sustain a growing population. I further discuss the great potential of this research as a case study to unravel the role of peripheries in broader socio-political and economic transformations during the Sasanian period.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21834