Conference overview
Throughout its long history, societies in the Iranian highlands have developed cultural traditions characterized by varying degrees of resilience as well as by an openness to surrounding cultural areas. Relations with Mesopotamia, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent saw ups and downs in the spheres of economic exchange, migration and political inclusion. Ancient outsiders considered the highlands as a source of raw materials and resources or as the home of “unruly mountain peoples”, have deeply influenced the way scholars view this region.
Societies of the Iranian highlands were, however, adept at integrating external relations into their own cultural and political networks, reshaping or resisting them. Some had an impact beyond the territory of present-day Iran, restructuring far-flung political and cultural fabrics (such as the Achaemenid and Sasanian empires), while at other times (e.g., during the Chalcolithic and Iron Ages), social groups developed small-scale but resilient agropastoral highland ways of life with strong internal cohesion.
The closing conference of SPP 2176 ‘The Iranian Highlands: Resilience and Integration of Premodern Societies’ traces the various economic, social and cultural processes in this region. The cultural and social patchwork of crisis management and resilience, as well as the capacity for integration into new cultural hybrids, will be guiding themes discussed as key elements of the SPP’s core interest in past Iranian highland societies. In particular, we examine how strategies of resource acquisition, institutional organization, daily life, and mobility were shaped by highland societies; and in what ways they differed from those of neighbouring lowland societies.