The Role of Groundwater and Sinkholes on Bronze and Iron Age Settlement Patterns in Sistan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists have leaned heavily on fluctuations in the channels of the Helmand River to explain the rise of Shahr-i Sokhta and the Helmand Civilization during the third millennium in the Sistan basin between Afghanistan and Iran, the subsequent abandonment of the region, and the return of complex settlement in the mid-first millennium BCE. Recent satellite imagery, geological modeling, and archaeological ground surveys offer new insight into regional water resources and their impact on settlement patterns. Unlike riverine settlements in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, Sistan is a fluvio-lacustrine environment located in a closed basin where surface and ground waters are trapped in a subsiding depression. Water collects along faults and fracture lines and dissolves the evaporitic lakebeds and bedrock beneath, forming hundreds of sinkholes. Survey data shows that many sites identified in Sistan were situated near these sinkholes or along local stream channels emanating from springs, which dried during periods of drought and filled with water in wetter periods. If local sources of water were available for human occupation and for agriculture, hunting, and fishing, we contend changes in early Sistan settlement through time depended on groundwater availability, not primarily on changes in the Helmand channel or its distributaries.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38105.0