Event: WEDS TALK: Yardımlı in the Late 1st Mil. BCE/Early 1st Mil. CE: Highland Developments in Southern Azerbaijan

ABSTRACT: Highland landscapes present both conceptual and practical challenges for archaeology and archaeologists, and remain both understudied and undertheorized. In this talk, I will discuss those issues and how they have informed fieldwork that I and my collaborators (Hannah Lau and Jeyhun Eminli) have been conducting in the Talış Mountains in recent years. This highland zone, which is part of the Alborz range, is a unique ecosystem at the southern limits of the Caspian Sea. I will highlight results of fieldwork from our 2024 season of SHARP (the Southeastern Highlands Archaeological Research Project) in the Yardımlı district of Azerbaijan, where we have begun to expose a surprisingly landscape of large-scale stone-built architecture dating to the late 1st millennium BCE, providing entirely new datapoints for our understanding of post-Achaemenid developments in this region.

BIO: Lara Fabian is an assistant professor of Iranian archaeology in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA whose work focuses on Iran and the Caucasus, and broader Southwest Asia, in the Iron Age and later. Her current book project considers the material imprint of empire in its afterlife through an examination of the post-Achaemenid world. Her scholarship is informed by historiographic and reception studies on the development of thought about antiquity and the question of Iran in the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and post-Soviet Eurasia. As part of this wider research, she has co-directed collaborative Azerbaijani-American fieldwork in Azerbaijan since 2016. Before coming to UCLA, she worked on the “Beyond the Silk Road” ERC project at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.