ABSTRACT

This arti­cle presents the dis­cov­ery and map­ping of a large, pre­vi­ous­ly unknown dast­gerd, or agri­cul­tur­al estate, in the Moham­mad­abad-Bagh­dasht Plain, south­ern Pars, Iran. The study inte­grat­ed remote sens­ing of his­tor­i­cal aer­i­al pho­tographs from 1966, Google Earth satel­lite imagery, drone pho­tographs, and inten­sive land­scape archae­o­log­i­cal sur­vey datasets. The pre­lim­i­nary field results show that this dast­gerd, estab­lished dur­ing the Sasan­ian peri­od (a.d. 224–651) and used through var­i­ous post-Sasan­ian eras, fea­tures mul­ti­ple gar­den lay­outs. The most promi­nent is the four­fold gar­den, or cha­harbagh, with a cen­tral square or pool crossed by axi­al water canals or walk­ways. Addi­tion­al designs include square and rec­tan­gu­lar lay­outs with inte­grat­ed walk­ways, canals, and pools. Irri­ga­tion was man­aged through the kariz (qanat) sys­tem and the Shur‑e Jereh Riv­er. The dis­cov­ery of two new gar­dens in this dast­gerd, togeth­er with oth­er pre­vi­ous­ly iden­ti­fied large agri­cul­tur­al estates and their exten­sive gar­dens in Cha­har­bazar and Boz­par, broad­ens our under­stand­ing of ancient Per­sian gar­dens, their designs, and water man­age­ment sys­tems in the core of the Sasan­ian home­land.

Please click the fol­low­ing link to view the full descrip­tion of the news: