A 03

The project is concerned with the question of which ResourceComplexes were able to develop in a landscape with largely constant natural conditions and with a largely unchanged natural resource potential under changing external conditions. It also researches which networks of people, materials, things and knowledge are and were necessary for their activation. As a common basis for the investigation and reconstruction of the respective central resources in the region at different periods, an explanatory model is used, which assumes a ResourceComplex of agriculture, handicrafts and trade, which is integrated into specifically constructed networks of relationships and only thereby becomes valuable and usable. The components of these networks consist of producers, traders, settlements, land, technological knowledge and objects, among others. Such assemblages or ResourceAssemblages of ResourceComplexes and networks operate in the field of tension between infrastructure, value system, politics, religion, etc. as framing structures. The network-supported ResourceComplexes in the region are on the one hand dependent on natural conditions, and on the other hand they are subject to specific, culturally and socially shaped dynamics in each period. This also shapes the respective regional and interregional exchange systems.
After the basic archaeological data of the hitherto almost unexplored region of southern Kerman had been investigated in the first phase of funding, the networks of the Bronze Age and comparatively of the earlier and later historical periods were explored in more detail through further fieldwork in the archaeological field during the second phase. This included the investigation of the relationship between raw material deposits and settlements, the routes, especially those to the coast of the Persian Gulf, the relation of the settlements to natural conditions and the resulting economic potential, the hierarchies of settlements as well as the socio-economic relations between sub-regions, such as mountains, valleys and plains. In addition, the origin of the objects made of chlorite and diorite/gabbro was to be determined by natural scientific analyses in order to be able to reconstruct the ancient exchange networks.
As a comparison, ethnology investigated the contemporary networks in the region. This included, above all, settlements of the archaeologically processed sub-regions and other location factors, the culture-specific significance of regional and interregional exchange relations, the present-day utilisation of mineral resources (chromite and gemstones) as well as non-material resources, such as technological knowledge, social capital and the analysis of the (social, economic and political) connections between sub-regions that differ in terms of natural space.
While the second phase focused on a field study in the mountains west of Jiroft, where ResourceComplexes around mineral resources such as chromite developed in the comparatively recent past, the third phase focuses on the Jebāl-e Bārez region east of Jiroft. Here, for example, ResourceComplexes around calcite are investigated, which show a long continuity in the region and whose investigation thus seems particularly suitable for the concrete connection of ethnology to archaeology beyond analogies.