Explorations reveal turning of historic hill into cemetery in SE Iran

The Public Relations Office of the Research Institute of Cultural Heritage and Tourism (RICHT), quoted the head of the archeological team, Reza Mehr Afarin, as saying on Sunday that the first season of archeological field exploration on Shahrestan Hill has been conducted with an aim of determining the limits and proposing the privacy of the hill as well as documentation, methodical survey, and geophysical studies.

Mehr Afarin who is an associate professor at the University of Mazandaran, further remarked that the massive ancient site which is also known as other names such as Azadkhan Hill and Baba Haji Hill, is located on the right side of the Sistan River with a distance of 80 km from it.

According to him, the Shahrestan Hill with a span of 18 hectares, is composed of the two northern and southern hills and is located 2.5 km east of Zahak and 23 km from Zabol, the capital city of Sistan and Baluchestan Province.

He said that the highest point of the site from the surrounding ground level is about 20 meters which is pulled like a tab from the northwest to the southeast with a length of 850 meters.

Currently the northern hill of the site is being used as a cemetery by the inhabitants of the nearby villages and has lost its original form due to the digging of numerous graves and the cultural materials, often pottery, are scattered over the graves, he added.

According to the archaeologist, the south hill which forms the main part of it comprises a tower and thick adobe fortification which has formed a compact and dense heap over which a large amount of red and orange color pottery are scattered.

The head of the archaeology team said that by comparing the typology which had already been conducted on a number of pottery samples in the site, the age of the pottery dates back to the Parthian and the Sassanid eras.

Stating that in some historical sources reference has been made to a city in Sistan which had been named Ram Shahrestan in the Sassanid era, it seems that the mentioned hill is the same city.

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