Morteza Djamali

• Mediterranean Institute of Marine and Terrestrial Biodiversity and Ecology

Iran, situated in Southwest Asia, showcases a diverse landscape, including three phytogeographical regions and two global biodiversity hotspots. This diversity is attributed to its intricate geology, mountainous terrain, wide altitudinal range, and heterogeneous climate, fostering a rich flora characterized by a significant proportion of endemism....

آسیب‌پذیری بالقوه جوامع اولیه دربرابر بلایای طبیعی مانند خشکسالی، سیل و قحطی ناشی از تغییرات آب‌و‌هوایی موضوع مهمی است که نیاز به مطالعات دقیقی دارد. هدف اصلی این پژوهش بررسی اثرات احتمالی تغییرات دیرینه محیطی و اقلیمی بر سکونتگاه‌های عصرمفرغ در جنوب‌شرق ایران و سلسله‌های اصلی حاکم بر ایران براساس شواهد باستان‌شناسی و تاریخی مرزهای سرزمینی، رونق اق...

The Iranian Zagros is a remarkable zone to study Middle and Upper Palaeolithic human occupations and Tang-e Shikan (Arsanjan) is a strategic cave site which archaeological evidence can be taken as a proxy for the southeast portion. Micromammals have been extensively used as palaeoecological indicators and here we use the assemblage from Tang-e Shik...

Postglacial flooding of the Persian Gulf (PG) was important in shaping human history and driving landscape changes in the region. However, there is a paucity of data regarding the postglacial transgression. The position of the PG at the edge of major synoptic systems of the Indian Ocean Summer Monsoon (IOSM) and Mid-latitude Westerlies (MLW) makes...

Urmia Lake in NW Iran was the world’s second largest hypersaline lake until three decades ago, when it began to lose ~ 90% of its surface area due to dwindling water input and enhanced evaporation. To help discern the role of natural vs anthropogenic factors in the rapid demise of Urmia Lake, we present a high-resolution, multi-proxy reconstruction...

While the exact technical processes employed in the construction of the pyramids are still a subject of ongoing debate, it is widely recognized that the Giza Plateau served as a hub where various trades converged with the common objective of building the necropolis. Of particular importance was the development of a local and sustainable food supply...

The paper is the first account on the excavation of the PPN site of Tappeh Qanzanchi near Kermanshah (Zagros). We present the other finds of Chalcolithic and Bronze Age levels that are also present in the long stratigraphic sequence.

The scarcity of high-resolution palaeoclimate records from the interior of West Asia has limited our understanding of the mechanisms of past climate change and their potential impacts on early human societies of the Eastern Fertile Crescent. Here, we present a multiproxy sedimentological, geochemical and palynological record from the Hashilan Wetla...

Despite the significance of the Iranian Plateau in the development of human civilization little is known about climate variability and its impact on human societies in this region due to the paucity of paleoclimate data. Almalou Crater Lake sustains the growth of plants inside the crater of a dormant volcanic cone which is exclusively fed by rainfa...

Layout & cover design: Sidestone Press Photograph cover: Mountain near Yazd in Iran. Photo: Pav-Pro Photography-stock.adobe.com (#122215020) ISBN 978-94-6426-145-5 (softcover) ISBN 978-94-6426-146-2 (hardcover) ISBN 978-94-6426-147-9 (PDF e-book)

The Firuzabad Plain in south Fars (Iran) is well known due to the circular city of Ardashir-Xurra, the first Sasanian (220 – 651 CE) capital, built by Ardashir Papakan around 220 CE, but its landscape evolution is not. Firuzabad is a relatively large and well-watered intermediate plain in the Zagros folded belt, about 80 km south of Shiraz. The arc...

The Achaemenids and Sasanian 'Persian' Empires were significant political, economic, and social forces in the Late Iron Age and Late Antiquity Eurasia, respectively, which have left marks on the heritage of the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern world. While attention is often focused on military and political conditions when discussing the prosperit...

Parrotia persica is one of the most notable endemic relict tree species growing in the Hyrcanian forest at the southern Caspian Sea. The recent discovery of sibling species Parrotia subaequalis, occurring in the temperate forests of south-eastern China, offers the opportunity to compare their morphology and ecological preferences and to dig deeper...

The pyramids of Giza originally overlooked a now defunct arm of the Nile. This fluvial channel, the Khufu branch, enabled navigation to the Pyramid Harbor complex but its precise environmental history is unclear. To fill this knowledge gap, we use pollen-derived vegetation patterns to reconstruct 8,000 y of fluvial variations on the Giza floodplain...

This study presents the results of a palynological investigation on a sediment core from the seasonal and saline Lake Maharlou in the Zagros Mountains in southwest Iran. We emphasised studying the role of man in modifying the vegetation of the area and the dominant agricultural practices during the Imperial Persia period (2,500–1,299 cal bp; 550 bc...

This study presents a new precise radiocarbon chronology for the World Heritage site of Sarvestan (SW Iran). The monument is a key construction in the history of architecture because it is a typical Sasanian construction built during the late Sasanian or early Islamic period. Previous attempts to date the monument have suggested the ages ranging fr...

Palaeoecology is increasingly contributing to conservation biology and restoration ecology by extending the recent annual to decennial records of ecological observations to centennial and millennial time scales. One of the almost neglected potential applications of palaeoecological investigations in conservation biology is the discovering of hidden...

The Sasanian period (224–651 CE) marked an era of large‐scale urban projects in southwest Asia, including Iran's semi‐arid highlands, with particular efforts to manipulate water bodies. This study presents a recent interdisciplinary investigation of a spring‐fed pond at the entrance of the Palace of Ardashir (Firuzabad plain, southwest Iran), part...

Located in the middle basin of the Pulvar river (Fars, Iran), Pasargadae was founded around 550 BCE in the early days of the Achaemenid Empire. Its territory is dotted with remains of imposing hydraulic facilities (dams, dikes, canals), some of which date to that very period. The purposes and functions of these structures, built to exploit surface...

Palynological and geochemical analyses provide valuable information about modern and past climatic regimes and vegetation. The impact of climate and humans on past vegetation in the semi-arid areas of northwestern Iran has received increased interest in the wake of warming temperatures in the Middle East. Palynological and down-core XRF elemental a...

The impacts of relative sea‐level (RSL) variations and crust mobility on the development of ancient harbours in the northern Persian Gulf are poorly understood. Many unanswered questions remain with regard to the main reasons for a shift in the location of the most important ancient harbours in the northern part of the Persian Gulf coastal since 50...

Mountainous regions, sometimes considered remote and marginal areas, have always hosted a variety of human activities. Indeed, the importance of altitudinal gradients, climatic conditions and repartition of the ecosystem resources create different constraints and opportunities. This session aims to bridge an interdisciplinary community (i.e. Archae...

Ongoing global change and its direct environmental impacts, in addition to securing economic transition to the post-oil era, could trigger complex socio-economic and political crises in oil-dependent economies of the Persian Gulf Region (PGR). To evaluate the role of climate change and related policies in degrading the environment and its socio-eco...

CONCEPTS OF RESILIENCE FOR THE STUDY OF PREMODERNSOCIETIES

Despite frequent historical documents on shipping and trade routes in the Caspian Sea since early historical dates, the maritime archaeological evidence remains largely undiscovered. Exposing a shipwreck in southwest corner of the Caspian Sea at the shoreline of Qoroq village in Guilan Province of Iran provides an opportunity to study some frames o...

The 19th century French architect Pascal-Xavier Coste was one of the first European artists to recognize Sasanian architecture as a distinct and significant architectural style in Late Antiquity. He considered this style to be parallel to Byzantine and Romanesque architecture in the Eastern and Western Roman Empire, respectively. Sasanian architect...

Southwest Asia is climatically and topographically a highly diverse region in the xeric belt of the Old World. Its diversity of arid habitats and climatic conditions acted as an important area for the evolution and diversification of up to 20 (of 38 known) independent Eudicot C4 origins. Some of these lineages present unique evolutionary strategies...

The pomegranate, Punica granatum L., is one of the oldest known edible fruits and is associated with the ancient civilizations of the Middle East. This is the first comprehensive book covering the botany, production, processing, health and industrial uses of the pomegranate. The cultivation of this fruit for fresh consumption, juice production, and...

Southwest Asia is climatically and topographically a highly diverse region in the xeric belt of the Old World. Its diversity of arid habitats and climatic conditions acted as an important area for the evolution and diversification of up to 20 (of 38 known) independent Eudicot C4 origins. Some of these lineages present unique evolutionary strategies...

We present the entomological results of a geological and biological exploration in he Lut desert, performed in 2014 by the Iranian National Institute for Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences (INIOAS) and the University of Tehran. Five localities were sampled, including the one considered as the the hottest spot on Earth. They yielded 15 insect tax...

The Eurasian (née European) Modern Pollen Database (EMPD) was established in 2013 to provide a public database of high-quality modern pollen surface samples to help support studies of past climate, land cover, and land use using fossil pollen. The EMPD is part of, and complementary to, the European Pollen Database (EPD) which contains data on fossi...

Abstract The striped hyena is the largest living omnivorous scavenger in SW Asia. It generally lives in semi-arid desert steppe regions, often denning in small caves, rock shelters, and burrows close to human settlements. Bone fragments of wild and domestic animals and desiccated scats are frequently found in the hyena dens. In this study, eight st...

Historical texts and archaeological studies attest to the maritime and trade importance of the Persian Gulf since the Sassanid Empires. Nonetheless, there is a paucity of data regarding ancient navigation and the reasons for a shift in maritime trade from the western (e.g. Shatt-al-Arab) to eastern (Siraf) Persian Gulf by the Abbasid dynasty. For s...

The striped hyaena is the largest living omnivorous scavenger in SW Asia. It generally lives in semi-arid desert steppe regions, often denning in small caves, rock shelters, and burrows close to human settlements. Bone fragments of wild and domestic animals and desiccated scats are frequently found in the hyaena dens. In this study, eight striped h...

Pollen morphology of 40 specimens of 15 species belonging to eight genera in the subfamily Salicornioideae (Chenopodiaceae), was studied using Light (LM) and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) to evaluate the taxonomic importance of pollen characters. Pollen grains were characteristically pantopolyporate with31-51 evenly distributed pores on the su...

Abstract. The Eurasian (née European) Modern Pollen Database (EMPD) was established in 2013 to provide a public database of high-quality modern pollen surface samples to help support studies of past climate, land-cover and land-use using fossil pollen. The EMPD is part of, and complementary to, the European Pollen Database (EPD) which contains data...

Pteropyrum is a small genus of Polygonaceae with four species from the arid regions of Iran and adjacent countries. Pteropyrum spp. are not precisely delimitated and are difficult to identify because of their high plasticity in morphological characters. Pteropyrum (C3) has a close affinity to Calligonum (C4) and is therefore a suitable case for C4...

The statistical reliability of a pollen count in representing the true composition of modern and fossil pollen assemblages depends on the minimum number of pollen grains counted. In palynological literature this number varies between < 150 and > 1000, but very few studies have probed the question using robust statistical approaches. Here, we use th...

Abstract: The late glacial – early Holocene transition is a key period in the earth’s history. However, although this transition is well studied in Europe, it is not well constrained in the Middle East and palaeohydrological records with robust chronologies remain scarce from this region. Here we present an interesting hydrobiological record showin...

We present for the first time a detailed report on the discovery of a new meteorite collection region in the Lut Desert, eastern-southeastern Iran, describing its geological, morphological, and climatic setting. Our search campaigns, alongside with the activity of meteorite hunters, yielded >200 meteorite finds. Here, we report on their classificat...

The Holocene colonisation of islands by humans has invariably led to deep-seated changes in landscape dynamics and ecology. In particular, burning was a management tool commonly used by prehistoric societies and it acted as a major driver of environmental change, particularly from the Neolithic onwards. To assess the role of early human impacts (e....

The Holocene colonisation of islands by humans has invariably led to deep-seated changes in landscape dynamics and ecology. In particular, burning was a management tool commonly used by prehistoric societies and it acted as a major driver of environmental change, particularly from the Neolithic onwards. To assess the role of early human impacts (e....

The Fertile Crescent, its hilly flanks and surrounding drylands has been a critical region for studying how climate has influenced societal change, and this review focuses on the region over the last 20,000 years. The complex social, economic, and environmental landscapes in the region today are not new phenomena and understanding their interaction...

Sedimentological (dry density, micro-facies analysis on thin-slides, X-ray diffraction, layer counting) and elemental analyses (X-ray fluorescence) of a 3.5-m-long sediment core (MAH-B) from saline Lake Maharlou (SW Iran) were used to infer hydrological changes over the last ~ 3800 years. The sediment consists of thin, alternating beds of evaporite...

Impacts of global climate change on terrestrial ecosystems are imperfectly constrained by ecosystem models and direct observations. Pervasive ecosystem transformations occurred in response to warming and associated climatic changes during the last glacial-to-interglacial transition, which was comparable in magnitude to warming projected for the nex...

Palustrine carbonates are frequently found associated with active and dried karstic springs in the foothills of the mountains bordering the Persepolis Basin, SW Iran. A combination of geological conditions favours their formation including: (i) the presence of karstic limestone aquifers in the limbs of anticlines cut through by fault systems, (ii)...

Although Iran is an interesting area, few palaeoclimatic records are available from it. Iran is a climatic and biogeographic crossroad and one of first civilization cradle. Subfossil chironomids, have recently proved their high potential as seasonality indicators in Neor region with a dominant continental Mediterranean climate. We present here two...

Due to severe anthropogenic impacts on lowland and submontane zones of the Hyrcanian forests of northern Iran, wild grapevine (Vitis vinifera subsp. sylvestris), a sporadically distributed woody liana, is currently considered an endangered species. Using data from the literature and 34 studied populations, herbarium assessments and nine palynologic...

Abstract The high-altitude Lake Neor along with its southern and southwestern marginal peatlands in northwestern Iran (Ardebil province) are unique in terms of floral and vegetation diversity. This floristic study presents the floral composition of different vegetational belts of the southern part of the lake and its marginal peatlands along a humi...

Aim To evaluate the biomization technique for reconstructing past vegetation in the Eastern Mediterranean–Black Sea–Caspian‐Corridor using an extensive modern pollen data set and comparing reconstructions to potential vegetation and observed land cover data. Location The region between 28–48°N and 22–62°E. Methods We apply the biomization techniq...

We reconstructed the paleohydrologic and climatic history of the Lake Neor region, NW Iran, from the end of the late glacial to the middle Holocene (15,500–7500 cal yr BP). Subfossil chironomid and pollen assemblages in a sediment core from a peatland located south of Lake Neor enabled identification of four main hydrologic phases. The period 15,50...

A set of 42 modern pollen samples has been investigated to determine the relationship between pollen percentages and vegetation composition along a 3600 m elevational mountain-desert transect in central Iran. The studied transect shows three main vegetation groups including a “high altitude zone” (embracing subnival, alpine and montane subzones), a...

Pollen data obtained from radiocarbon-dated sediments of several peat bogs and lakes located in different parts of Iran and surrounding areas have recently provided invaluable new information on agricultural practices during the Persian empires, from the Achaemenids to the Sasanians. A review of the published and unpublished data has revealed disti...

The Younger Dryas – Early Holocene transition is characterized by major climate and environmental changes at the global scale. While this period is relatively well documented throughout the temperate areas of the Northern hemisphere, Middle-East regions stay poorly investigated. In the present study, two sedimentary records (Arjan and Neor lake rec...

Timber in an archaeological context can be used to establish chronologies, to understand the history of architecture and to reconstruct cultural landscapes and natural vegetation in the past. In this study, we use the xylological identifications and radiocarbon dating results of five timber fragments recently discovered in three palaces or palace-l...

Environmental changes since the late deglaciation are reconstructed from the sediment of Lake Hamoun. Lake Hamoun is located at the border of Iran and Afghanistan where inflowing rivers originate from the drainage basins of SW Hindu Kush Mountains and westernmost Himalaya. The lake has experienced a complex hydrological history during the late Quat...

The aim of this study is to describe the environmental and climate changes that occurred in the mountains of Aubrac at the transition between the Lateglacial and the Holocene, from a comparative analysis of fossil Coleoptera and pollen, and a series of 23 ¹⁴C dates. The changes affecting the ecological categories of Coleoptera lead to a division of...

The Gorgan Plain (NE Iran) is characterized by fertile soils formed on a loess plateau and is at present primarily exploited for intensive agriculture. However, the timing and intensity of the human impact on the landscape in the past are still unclear. A sediment core, taken from the centre of the eastern Gorgan Plain in the Kongor Lake covering t...

The brine shrimp Artemia urmiana, an abundant inhabitant of the hypersaline Urmia Lake in northwestern Iran, has recently been described from Lake Koyashskoe, also a shallow hypersaline lake that is located on the Black Sea coast of the Crimean Peninsula (Ukraine). This discovery has questioned the endemicity of A. urmiana in Urmia Lake and has als...

This paper investigates the Holocene vegetation dynamics for Burmarrad in Northwest Malta and provides a pollen-based quantitative palaeoclimatic reconstruction for this centrally located Mediterranean archipelago. The pollen record from this site provides new insight into the vegetation changes from 7280 to 1730 cal BP which correspond well with o...

Lake Urmia, the second largest hyper saline lake in Eurasia, is located in a closed-continental drainage basin in northwest Iran. In the past, the lake had a rich biodiversity that included numerous migratory and native birds and the endemic brine shrimp Artemia urmiana. The unique and yet fragile natural environment in the lake earning status as a...

The continental environments, lakes are proper for deposition locations of evaporites. Evaporite minerals are formed wherever the evaporation rate is more than incoming water to the basin. In this article the evaporate deposits (Calcite, Gypsum and Halite) are studied in a sedimentary core of Lake Maharlou, Zagros Mountains, South of Iran. The core...

Core sediments from the dry lake bed of Hamoun were subdivided into 3 main sedimentary units using a multi-proxy approach (e.g. petrography, grain size analysis, total organic matter % and CaCO3% determination) to reconstruct the palaeoenvironment of the Sistan Basin (SE Iran) as a transition zone between the monsoon summer precipitation zone of so...

Two short (100 and 175 cm-long) sediment cores from the southwestern corner of Lake Urmia provide a record of vegetation dynamics, lake-level changes and the role of climate and humans in shaping the landscape around Lake Urmia over the last 2550 years. Relatively low values of arboreal pollen (AP), and substantial values of Artemisia pollen from 2...