Expedition Name (& Club): Ten thousand years of environmental change and human habitation in NE Iran

Destination country: Iran
Region:

Lat: 33.9866 Long: 58.3649 Elevation: m
MEF funding: Applying for MEF funding

Leader: Vasile Ersek

Brief Expedition objectives:

List a short summary of the main Expedition objectives.

We will investigate the last 10,000 years of environmental change and its effect on human populations in the deserts of NE Iran. We are going to date the growth periods of cave carbonate formations and will examine whether or not the abandonment of the site was caused by a decrease in the availability of water.

How can the GPF support your Expedition?:

Please explain the aspects of the trip which make it eligible for Ghar Parau funding.

Our proposed study will begin to fill a large gap in our knowledge of the interlinked climatic and archaeological records of western Asia. However, there is an additional societal impact that is relevant to this project. Iran is one of the most earthquake-prone regions on the continents and many of the major population centres are close to active faults. Earthquakes in Iran thus cause frequent severe loss of life, such as at Bam in 2003, in which more than 30,000 people died. The striking correlation between the location of destructive earthquakes and centres of population is explained by the restricted availability of water, which is closely associated with the distribution of active faults: both by the channelling of ground waters along faults to form springs, and by the production over geological time of large mountain ranges that collect snow in winter and possess water tables that are elevated with respect to surrounding lowlands. The populations in desert parts of Iran are, at present, forced to live in regions that are at risk from earthquakes. It appears that this situation has not always been the case, however, and farming settlements were initially free to develop within desert basins far from the damaging effects of earthquakes.

Detailed description of objectives:

Give a more detailed account of the purpose of the trip, including any particular known caves you intend to visit, specific areas where you will explore for new cave, and scientific experiments you will attempt.

We propose to determine the history of environmental changes that have occurred in the desert basins of Iran over the last 10,000 years, and the effect that these changes have had on the people living in and around these basins. The focus of our study is an abandoned settlement, sited deep within a now inhospitable desert near Dasht-e-Bayaz in NE Iran, which was sustained through a network of surface canals fed by a reservoir of 1 km diameter. The people NE Iran now live at the desert edges and use underground canals (Qanats) to channel the sparse water supplies. However, the existence of an ancient site indicates a much wetter climate existed in the past. We will combine dating of cave speleothem (such as stalagmites, stalactites and flowstones) growth periods with dates obtained from sediments laid down in the reservoir in order to provide a detailed history of occupation, and eventual abandonment, of the site. The history of occupation will be compared with records of environmental change, which we will extract from carbonate formations sampled in nearby caves and from samples of the lakebed sediments in order to examine whether abandonment of the site was caused by aridification of the environment. The project will be performed in collaboration with our colleagues at the Geological Survey of Iran and the University of Tehran, with whom we have excellent and long-standing links. Our results will be important for geographical, geological, and archaeological studies of Iran, and will provide important constraints on the role that environment change has played in shaping the present-day way of life in this arid region. We will explore the nearby Battoon (33.98664N / 58.36487E), Moghen (36.11561N / 59.36858E) and Bolour (34.754722N / 58.473464 E) caves as well as look for additional caves in the area. We have photographic evidence, from pictures on GoogleEarth, that both stalagmites and stalactites occur within these three caves and the very existence of these cave formations indicates that much wetter conditions than today existed at some point in the past. We believe it is extremely important to preserve the cave environment and we will sample predominantly speleothems that are already broken. The potential to find broken speleothems is very high considering that the area is seismically very active. Speleothems have the important advantage that they can be readily dated using uranium-thorium techniques to provide probably the best dated of all palaeoclimate records and thus obtain a precise and accurate chronology of past wet periods. Depending on the growth rate of the speleothems, it may also be possible to extract additional palaeoclimatic information by measuring their oxygen and carbon isotopic compositions, which will give information about changes in the amount of rain and type of vegetation above the cave.

Previous work in this area:

Give details of any previous work in this area by your own and other teams. Include references to reports and articles published on the area, and the names of any local cavers or academics with whom you have discussed the Expedition.

Richard Walker and the Iranian team members all have wide experience of working in eastern Iran. Dr. Walker has ten field seasons in Iran between 2000 and 2010, but no caves were explored by Dr Walker or his collaborators.