Qualla: Tepe Yahya

Tepe Yahya: Introduction

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Darafsh, CC BY 3.0. Twenty-seven clay tablets, pressed with symbols that no one alive can read, lay buried beneath a circular mound in the desert of Kerman Province. When C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky of Harvard University first broke ground here in 1968, he expected to find traces of ancient trade routes crossing southeastern Iran. What he found instead was a site occupied, abandoned, and reoccupied across seven and a half millennia -- a place where Neolithic farmers, Proto-Elamite administrators, and Sasanian-era settlers all chose to build, one civilization stacking its foundations atop another's ruins.

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Image: Darafsh | CC BY 3.0

Tepe Yahya: The Mound That Held Millennia

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Falten-Jura, CC0. Tepe Yahya rises 20 meters above the surrounding plain, a circular mound roughly 187 meters across, located about 220 kilometers south of Kerman city and 90 kilometers southwest of Jiroft. Its seven occupation periods span from roughly 5500 BC to 225 AD. The deepest layer, Period...

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Image: Falten-Jura | CC0

Tepe Yahya: Soapstone and Far-Flung Trade

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Falten-Jura, CC0. A steatite mine discovered nearby helps explain why people kept coming back. Over a thousand carved steatite pieces from Period IVB alone point to large-scale local manufacturing during the second half of the third millennium BC. These were not just local goods. Bowls carved at T...

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Image: Falten-Jura | CC0

Tepe Yahya: Where Writing Found Its Eastern Edge

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dorieo, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the late fourth millennium BC, something unprecedented happened at the top of the mound. A monumental Proto-Elamite building rose over the site, covering most of its summit, constructed with standardized bricks measuring 48 by 24 by 8 centimeters. The builders used a base meas...

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Image: Dorieo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tepe Yahya: Copper, Lead, and the Forge

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hnapel, CC0. Writing was not the only technology reaching Tepe Yahya through long-distance networks. Four metal artifacts recovered from the site trace the evolution of early metallurgy in southeastern Iran. A copper spearhead from layer IVC2 was found alongside a metal vessel containing jaro...

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Image: Hnapel | CC0

Tepe Yahya: Six Seasons, One Story

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dorieo, CC BY-SA 4.0. Harvard's Peabody Museum, working jointly with Shiraz University, excavated Tepe Yahya over six seasons between 1968 and 1975. Among the team members in that first season was Jane Britton, a young graduate student whose subsequent murder in Cambridge in 1969 would become one of t...

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Image: Dorieo | CC BY-SA 4.0