The Pasargad Heritage Foundation wishes to acknowledge the passing of Professor Sadegh Malek Shahmirzadi, an Iranian archaeologist and researcher, on October 13 in Tehran.
Professor Shahmirzadi completed his studies in archeology at the University of Tehran, and his master’s degree at the Institute of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago. He then received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to his educational work, Shahmirzadi was also in charge of excavating many historical sites in Iran, including: Sagzabad, Zagheh, Poeinak Varamin, and Aq Tepe in Golestan Province.
One of Shahmirzadi’s most important efforts was the restoration “ Tape Sialk” – a large ancient archeological site- , which took five years.
In addition to university teaching, Professor Shahmirzadi was a prolific and active researcher and an author of many scientific and educational publications in archeology. He was the author of several books and articles in Farsi and English, including an archaeological textbook titled, “Prehistoric Iran: Archaeology of Iran from the Beginning to the Dawn of Urbanism.”

BANGKOK, THAILAND reports that archaeologist Kanniga Premjai and her team of
climbers have discovered rock art in one of the remote, unmapped caves in Sam Roi Yot National Park, which is located in the northern Malay Peninsula. Kanniga estimates the ochre drawings are between 2,000 and 3,000 years old. Noel Hidalgo Tan of Southeast Asia’s Regional Center for Archaeology and Fine Arts said the rock art was likely created by hunter-gatherers who had a camp in the mountains. Thailand’s oldest-known rock art, located further north, is between 5,000 and 11,000 years old, Kanniga added.

At a time when the cultural and historical heritage of Iran has fallen victim to negligence and destruction both intentional and unintentional, and while Iran’s tourism is at its worst, the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Tourism of Tehran has ordered violence against women without hijab (Islamic religious covering), following the directions of some of the religious ayatollahs.
This has been one of the ways in which the Islamic Republic has clamped down on human rights and freedoms and have attacked women once again.
According to Iranian local news agencies, Parham Janfeshan, the director general of cultural heritage and tourism in Tehran Province, has issued an order to travel agencies telling them that women must abide by Islamic behavior and the full hijab on all domestic and foreign trips.

Millions of ibis and birds of prey mummies, sacrificed to the Egyptian gods Horus, Ra or Thoth, have been discovered in the necropolises of the Nile Valley. Such a quantity of mummified birds raises the question of their origin: Were they bred, like cats, or were they hunted? Scientists from the CNRS, the Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 and the C2RMF have carried out extensive geochemical analyses on mummies from the Musée des Confluences, Lyon. According to their results, published on 22nd September 2020 in the journal Scientific Reports, they were wild birds.

Mammals, reptiles, birds: The tens of millions of animal mummies deposited as offerings in the necropolises of the Nile Valley bear witness to an intense religious fervor, and to the practices of collecting and preparing animals that undoubtedly contributed significantly to the economy from the Old Kingdom (3rd millennium BC) to Roman Egypt (1st-3rd centuries AD). However, the origin of these animals and the methods of supply remain unknown. For some tamed species, such as the cat, breeding was probably the most efficient way of supplying large numbers of animals for mummification. But unlike cats, bird mummies cover all stages of development, from egg to adult, which may indicate more opportunistic sourcing practices.

In order to determine the origin—breeding or hunting—of the mummified birds, tiny fragments of feathers, bones and embalming strips were taken from 20 ibis and birds of prey mummies from the collections of the Musée des Confluences, Lyon. If these birds, which migrate in the wild, had been bred, their diet would have been homogeneous, of local origin and reflected in the uniform isotopic composition of the animal remains, regardless as to whether that diet had been produced specifically or derived from that of coexisting humans.

The various tissues were therefore dated using the carbon-14 method and the isotopic compositions of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and strontium were measured, interpreted in terms of food sources and compared with those of contemporaneous human mummies. However, far from being homogeneous, these isotopic compositions showed a high variability and ‘exotic’ signatures compared to those of ancient Egyptian humans: the birds were wild, migrating seasonally out of the Nile Valley.

These results, combined with that of a genetic study carried out by another team, suggest the mass hunting and capture of birds as documented on certain tomb frescoes (for example, on the wall of Nakht’s tomb in the Theban Necropolis). Indeed, the Egyptians probably exerted a significant ecological pressure on wild bird populations long before the decline in avifauna observed today.

https://phys.org/news/2020-09-wild-birds-egyptian-gods.html

The University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum has removed a collection of shrunken heads on display over concerns that they “reinforced racist and stereotypical thinking.”
On Monday, the acclaimed museum shared in a statement that visitors will see a number of “contentious displays” removed from its exhibits when its doors reopen to the public on Sept. 22.
The museum — which is one of the leading museums of anthropology, ethnography, and archaeology in the world — has removed 1230 human remains from its display as part of a museum-wide effort to “decolonize” the institution.
According to The Washington Post, decolonizing is described as “a process that institutions undergo to expand the perspectives they portray beyond those of the dominant cultural group, particularly white colonizers.”
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Among the remains removed are the South American tsantas, also known as the “shrunken heads,” which were acquired by the museum between 1884 and 1936.
While the heads have been one of the museum’s most popular attractions since the 1940s, museum director Laura Van Broekhoven said that many visitors found the remains as “a testament to other cultures being ‘savage’, ‘primitive’ or ‘gruesome’.”
According to the museum, during the 19th and 20th centuries, the shrunken heads were collector’s items and were often traded by colonialists. These exchanges led “to a steep increase in violent warfare” at the time.
“Rather than enabling our visitors to reach a deeper understanding of each other’s ways of being, the displays reinforced racist and stereotypical thinking that goes against the Museum’s values today,” she continued. “The removal of the human remains also brings us in line with sector guidelines and code of ethics.”
The Shuar and Achuar communities — who created the tsantas — have long argued the removal of the heads from museums.
“We don’t want to be thought of as dead people to be exhibited in a museum, described in a book, or recorded on film… Our ancestors handed over these sacred objects without fully realizing the implications,” Shuar indigenous leaders, Miguel Puwáinchir and Felipe Tsenkush, explained in the statement.
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The museum began an ethical review of its artifacts in 2017 in order to identify and prioritize displays that “required urgent attention because of the derogatory language used in the historic case labels or because they played into stereotypical thinking about cultures across the globe.”
Marenka Thompson-Odlum, a research associate who helped to curate the new displays, explained that removing the artifacts should not be considered a loss.
“What we are trying to show is that we aren’t losing anything but creating space for more expansive stories,” she said. “That is at the heart of decolonisation. We are allowing new avenues of story-telling and ways of being to be highlighted.”
According to the museum statement, Pitt Rivers still houses more than 2,800 human remains and is continuing to reach out to descendant communities to “find the most appropriate way to care for these complex items.”
When the museum reopens later this month, informational signs will be displayed in place of the artifacts to explain their removal.