Analysis of settlement patterns of the Upper Zarrineh River Basin in the Iron Age III

The archaeological site of Ziwiye in the upper Zarrineh River basin is considered one of the key sites for understanding the cultural and political developments of Iron Age III societies of the northwest Iran. However, despite years of excavation at Ziwiye, key questions about this area still remain unanswered. It seems that sites such as Ziwiye, Qalaichi, Zandan-Soleimian, Rabat and Hasanlu indicate a widespread settlement pattern with a political centrality role in the northwestern Iran during the late Iron Age. The pattern in which the local states centered on these sites dominated the entire cultural and geographical area through regional interaction. Therefore, in the present research, with the archaeological survey of the Upper Zarrineh River Basin, focusing on the role and significance of Ziwiye in the political and cultural structure of this region, an attempt has been made to provide a model of regio­- nal-political development to understand the developments of the late Iron Age in this region. The studied pottery from the field survey indicates that Ziwiye was not an isolated castle and had an organized cultural and political interaction with the surroun­ding archaeological sites. In order to understand the status of sites like Ziwiye in the geographical region of the northwestern Iran, in the first step it is necessary to determine its position in the more limited cultural area around it, in the Upper Zarrineh River basin, so that it is possible to recognize the status of Ziwiye in the area of complex cultural–political geography of northwestern Iran in the Iron Age III. Based on this, the study of the Upper Zarrineh River basin was undertaken. Although some studies had previously been conducted in this basin, to understand the settlement position of Ziwiye in relation to its surrounding sites, an archaeological survey around Hasanlu was carried out within a radius of 15 km in the mountains and 30 km in the plains, which is the same distance a horse rider could travel per day. The results of this research indicate that the Ziwiye site was the most important settlement in the upper Zarrineh River basin, which had political, military and cultural dominance over the surrounding area.