Abstract
The aim of this paper is to examine the interactions between people and the natural environment against a background of climatic change. The focus of attention is on the Bampur Valley, which is located in the global transitional climatic area. During the fourth and third millennium BCE, an important urban society, which was in close economic contacts with the urban societies of the Sistan Basin, Jiroft, Soghan Valley, the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia, emerged in this Bampur Valley along the river bed of the Bampur River. This Valley, which is located along the main natural overland trade routes, not only developed as intermediary for long-distance trade between east and west but also functioned as an important industrial and economical pole in southeast Iran. It is argued that the global transitional climate area, which is generally located between tropical and subtropical areas, has constantly been faced with periodical changes including dry and humid during worm period. Based on the archaeological and environmental evidence, with reference to uniformitarianism theory and with using GIS, it will be attempted to evaluate movement, collapse and interaction between settlements and natural environment in the Bampur Valley. The disciplines of archaeology and geography have much in common, being concern respectively with the spatial and temporal dimensions of the human condition. Archaeology deals with those aspects of the human past which are mainly elucidated using material remains rather than written sources. The prime concern of geography is to understand the processes that operate within the natural environment (physical geography) and to evaluate the ways in which people interact both with their environment and with each other (human geography). Evidence discovered from the archaeological and geographical surveys carried out in the area between 2002 and 2005 by authors testify to environmental changes, which caused instability and collapse of the human communities in prehistoric and the present times in the Bampur Valley.<em> </em>
Highlights
It is argued that the first stage to evaluate previous environmental circumstances is to look at these conditions globally
All through this paper methodological uniformitarianism provides the cornerstone for reconstructing the past and is necessary for achieving any measure of understanding of the processes and patterns of environmental changes in the Bampur Valley
This approach, which firstly applied in the Iranian archaeology in this paper, tried to reconstruct the environmental changes in the Bampur Valley
Summary
It is argued that the first stage to evaluate previous environmental circumstances is to look at these conditions globally. Environmental changes may be happened because of drought, earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions and other cataclysmic events (Chorley et al 1964) These environmental limitations, which may deeply influence modern environment, must have been effective in the past. It is notable to state that the growth of the unifromitarian approach, which firstly stated by the geologist James Hutton, was a fundamental departure from the catastrophist school of thought In this framework, it is believed that previous changes of the earth’s surface may be explained in terms of those processes observed to activate at the present day; or the present is the key to the past (Bell and Walker 1996: 15). The aim of this paper is two folded, firstly to evaluate the environmental changes of the Bampur Valley and to examine the interactions between people and the natural environment of the Valley during the third millennium BC
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