This year, to mark both Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day we are highlighting the incredible contribution of women to the archaeology of Iran, from the earliest horizons of humanity through the Islamic period. Learn more about some of the extraordinary female contributors to New Voices in Iranian Archaeology (Oxbow Books, 2024), whose research interests, work, and achievements speak for themselves.
By Megan Cifarelli and the Script Books Team | 4 min read
Elham Ghasidian
Elham Ghasidian earned her PhD in Palaeolithic Archaeology from the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Germany (2010) and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, University of Cambridge, UK. She is a senior researcher at the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, Germany. Her main research interests revolve around human evolution and hominin cultural diversity, focusing on the development of ecological and cultural behaviour in the Iranian Plateau and neighbouring areas during the late Pleistocene. She has participated in more than 30 archaeological expeditions as team member and head. Since 2018, she has served as the supervisor of the research project ‘Southern Caspian Corridor: a biogeographical hominin dispersal route’ in the Neanderthal Museum.
Dr. Ghasidian is the lead author of ‘The Southern Caspian Corridor: A hominin biogeographical expansion route’ in New Voices in Iranian Archaeology.
Zohreh Shirazi
Zohreh Shirazi received her PhD in environmental archaeology from the University of Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, in 2012. Her main area of specialization is archaeobotany. She has worked on archaeobotanical collections in Iran coming from different chronological contexts ranging from the Palaeolithic to the Islamic periods. She has participated in archaeological fieldwork in southeastern Iran including Shahr-i Sokhta, Tepe Sadegh, Tepe Taleb Khan, Tepe Yalda, Konar Sandal, and Tepe Gav Koshi. Shirazi is the author of several scientific peer-reviewed articles and is currently the founding director of the archaeobotanical laboratory of the Southeastern Regional Museum of Iran at Zahedan and World Heritage Base of Shahr-i Sokhta.
Dr. Shirazi contributed to the chapter ‘Identification of plant remains found at the underground channels of Persepolis’ in New Voices in Iranian Archaeology.
Zohreh Zehbari
Zohreh Zehbari is an Iranian archaeologist currently serving as a post-doctoral researcher at Philipps-Universität Marburg. She earned her PhD from the University of Tehran in 2019 and has conducted extensive research on ceramics and art across various historical periods, with a particular focus on the Achaemenid and Sasanian eras.
Dr. Zehbari is the lead author of ‘Dehqāed: A lesser-known Sasanian center in the Borāzjān Plain,Southern Iran’ in New Voices in Iranian Archaeology.
Marjan Mashkour
Marjan Mashkour is an archaeozoologist and bioarchaeologist specializing in southwest Asian mammalian and bird remains. Her work is concentrated on the Iranian Plateau and adjacent regions. Through a diachronic approach to the subsistence economies, she is interested in a better characterization of the sedentary and non-sedentary societies in the past. She leads several projects for the characterization of herding strategies using biogeochemistry and isotopic analyses, as well as morphometric analyses, while collaborating with geneticists. Since 2002 she has trained several archaeozoologists in Iran and France, the majority of them women. She co-directed for 6 years the Archaeozoology and Archaeobotany Research Group (AASPE) recently changed to BioArch, at the CNRS and the Natural History Museum of Paris.
Dr. Mashkour is one of the authors of ‘Iran–China joint archaeological excavations at Tepe Naderi, Shirvan, Northern Khorasan: Preliminary report of the 2016 and 2018 season’ in New Voices in Iranian Archaeology.
New Voices in Iranian Archaeology is available now from the Pen and Sword Books website.
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