Excavating in Iran and Central Asia: Cooperation or Competition

In the study of the human past, the Iranian plateau and Central Asia have the privilege to host some of the most significant historical, archaeological and cultural developments on the planet. From around the 2nd millennium BC, the Iranian plateau participated in the realization of a series of ever larger and powerful political units, culminating in the Achaemenid dynasty of the first millennium BC, and the numerous chiefdoms and state political formations, many of which nomadic in character, in Central Asia. The activities of the archaeological research in Iran and Central Asia, therefore, provide a framework for placing some of the most significant events of the past. In today's ongoing European cultural and economic expansion, with Iran as a future near neighbour and Central Asia as a kind of suburban farther, but at the Western border with China, the need for a more in-depth understanding and appreciation of their past and, therefore, of the present, can hardly be procrastinated over time. Those areas have been essential in the history of humanity, regardless of their historical, linguistic and ethnic background, and their political/national outcomes in the modern and contemporary times as well. The archaeological activities within those areas have been at least since one century essential as well in order to understand the related Western and native consciousness of their historical past.