مهدی علیرضازاده

This paper, reflecting on the village and archaeological site of Jamalo located on the top of the Zayanderud dam, aims to explore the circumstances human settlements would have encounter with the construction of the dam and when its reservoirs were flooded. About 30 years ago, as the images from Google Map showed, the water strip emerging from the Zayanderud dam, wherein the left riverbank hosted the village and archaeological site of Jamalo. This site had been occupied for much of the sixth and fifth millennium BC until the beginning of the Early Bronze Age. In the Middle Bronze Age, it had been dominated by the Proto-literate, historic, and Islamic periods. Archaeological evidence from surface surveys also indicated that pottery shreds were similar to those of Sialk III and Bakun A. Now, Jamalo is exposed to the waters of the dam reservoir. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to provide an overview of what would have happened to archaeological sites with the construction of the dam, its reservoirs were flooded, and when landscapes were radically altered. Another question was: “What would have happened to archeological sites as floods made it inaccessible?” Based on the excavation at Jamalo and the comparison of images taken from the region before and after the construction of the dam, it was observed that the reservoir had destroyed the village, and the slopes of the site, especially on the eastern and northeastern parts, had been covered with a layer of deposits.

A regular hexagon is one of the shapes introduced in Plane Geometry and refers to a hexagon with equal sides wherein the size of each angle is 120 degrees. This geometric shape, which can be quickly drawn today, was constructed over a long period in the millennia BC In the Late Neolithic period in Mesopotamia, the primary geometric shapes, including triangles, quadrilaterals, arcs, and circles, were additionally painted on the surface of pottery ware. Naturally, these shapes had been initially drawn by hand, and the sides of the polygons were not comprised of straight lines, or the circles had not been drawn perfectly. However, in the Chalcolithic age, geometric shapes moved away from handmade forms and approached standard ones. This standardization was not possible without drawing tools. In the meantime, the role of compasses or other objects with a similar use was of utmost importance because drawing a circle with such tools paved the way for drawing regular polygons. In fact, from the Late Neolithic, handmade triangles and arcs in the Near East, the first regular hexagon in the late second or the early first millennium emerged over several thousand years. Constructing this geometric shape with the help of standard circles and arcs has been well documented in the Near Eastern archaeological evidence. On the other hand, regular hexagons have been attributed to the second half of the first millennium in the history of mathematics. Therefore, this study reflected on the construction process of this geometric shape and dated its drawing hundreds of years back.