A "Jiroft culture"[1] has been postulated as an early Bronze Age (late 3rd millennium BC) archaeological culture, located in what is now Iran's Sistan and Kermān Provinces. The hypothesis is based on a collection of artifacts that were confiscated in Iran and accepted by many to have derived from the Jiroft area in south central Iran, reported by online Iranian news services, beginning in 2001.
The proposed type site is Konar Sandal, near Jiroft in the Halil River area. Other significant sites associated with the culture include; Shahr-e Sukhteh (Burnt City), Tepe Bampur, Espiedej, Shahdad, Iblis, and Tepe Yahya.
The proposition of grouping these sites as an "independent Bronze Age civilization with its own architecture and language", intermediate between Elam to the west and the Indus Valley Civilization to the east, is due to Yousef Majidzadeh, head of the archaeological excavation team in Jiroft. Yousef Majidzadeh speculates they may be the remains of the lost Aratta Kingdom. Yousef Majidzadeh's conclusions have met with skepticism from some reviewers. Other conjectures (e.g. Daniel T. Potts, Piotr Steinkeller) have connected the Konar Sandal with the obscure city-state of Marhashi, that apparently lay to the east of Elam proper.
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Many artifacts associated with Jiroft were recovered from looters described as "destitute villagers" who had scavenged the area south of Jiroft before 2001, when a team led by Yousef Majidzadeh began excavations. The team uncovered more than two square kilometers of remains from a city dating back to at least the late 3rd millennium BC.
The looted artifacts and some vessels recovered by the excavators were of the so-called "intercultural style" type of pottery known from Mesopotamia and the Iranian Plateau, and since the 1960s from nearby Tepe Yahya in Baft. The "Jiroft civilization" hypothesis proposes that this "intercultural style" is in fact the distinctive style of a previously unknown, long-lived civilization.
This is not universally accepted. Archaeologist Oscar Muscarella of the Metropolitan Museum of Art criticizes that the excavators resorted to sensationalist announcements while being more slow in publishing scholarly reports, and their claims that the site's stratigraphy shows continuity into the 4th millennium as overly optimistic. Muscarella does nevertheless acknowledge the importance of the site.
Earlier excavations in Kerman were conducted by Sir Aurel Stein around 1930.
One of the most notable archaeological excavations done in Kerman Province was one done by a group led by Professor Joseph Caldwell from Illinois State Museum in 1966 (Tal-i-Iblis) and Lamberg-Karlovsky from Harvard University in 1967 (Tepe Yahya Sogan Valley, Dolatabad).
Archeological excavations in Jiroft led to the discovery of several objects belonging to the fourth millennium BC.
According to Majidzadeh, geophysical operations by French experts in the region indicate the existence at least 10 historical and archaeological periods in the region belonging to different civilizations who lived in this area during different periods of time in history. According to the French experts who studied this area, the evidence remained from these civilizations may be traced up to 11 metres under the ground.
The primary Jiroft site, consists of two mounds a few kilometers apart, called Konar Sandal A and B with a height of 13 and 21 meters, respectively (approximate location ). At Konar Sandal B, a two-story, windowed citadel with a base of close to 13.5 hectares was found.
Madjidzadeh claims to have discovered inscriptions in a previously unknown script, allegedly comparable to linear Elamite, dated to ca. the 22nd century BC.[2] The announcement of this discovery was received with skepticism. Lawler (2007) quotes Jacob Dahl, specialist in ancient texts at Berlin's Free University, as saying "No specialist in the world would consider these to be anything but absolute fakes."
Piotr Steinkeller, professor of Assyriology in Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of Harvard University, said that "the discovered inscription in Jiroft does not have any relations with Elamite scripts and belongs to the eastern civilization".[3]
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