The wide gap between poor and rich, neoliberal economies and the acceleration of absolute poverty have resulted in the emergence of garbage-based subsistence. The most discriminated groups of people comprised of unemployed people, refugees, people with disabilities and minorities form what is called ‘garbage collector’ or ‘waste collector/picker’ communities. These communities usually live beside or very close to the landfills (including those which have been bulldozered flat), and reportedly their diet, lifestyle, and income resources are directly tied to the waste produced and discarded by the middle and upper classes. Besides inequality and discrimination, the durability of waste, dominated by plastic, is a significant factor in forming Garbage Cities and garbage-based subsistence. Pieces of plastic discarded by other citizens can be used by garbage collectors for different purposes, such as building slums, being used as doors and windows or as a source of income. This chapter will open a debate on how to formulate the lifestyle of garbage collectors and communities by investigating their daily lives, settlements, and material culture. My main argument in this chapter is that the presence and reuse of durable waste (mainly plastic objects) is one of the indicator elements of garbage collector communities worldwide and can be assumed as one of the significant material cultures on which garbage-based subsistence has emerged.

Iran lies in an earthquake belt, and many Iranians have highlighted memories of natural disasters. While visiting Bam, a city destroyed by a severe earthquake, my team and I realized that some inhabitants attribute the disaster to nuclear tests. These rumours were also heard from the survivors of the earthquake in Sarpol-e Zahab in 2018. Looking deeper into the roots of nuclear rumours, I found the origin of rumours about the unnatural cause of the earthquake many years earlier, before the 1979 revolution and in the Tabas 1978 disaster. In this article, the nuclear folklore around earthquakes in Iran has been investigated. Analysing public opinion about disasters without considering their perceptions, rumours, and folklore is not complete. The current study reveals an overlooked mechanism based on the long-term dictatorship and untrustful media have made understanding the disasters complicated in the country.

Homogenization, Gender and Everyday Life in Pre- and Trans-modern Iran: An Archaeological Reading is actually an effort to investigate the interaction of power structure and gender in the context of everyday life in Iran in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The book pursues two main goals: situating gender in Iranian archaeology and calling for more consideration to daily life in archaeological gender researches. Drawing on a wide range of material culture, textual evidence, statistics and oral accounts, all chapters render the destruction of the everyday life of ordinary people. Events like parties and ceremonies, marriage and kinship, sexual practices, dress codes and even eating and drinking were gently regulated by the surveillance state. Accordingly, the term homogenization in the book's title refers to the policies of the Pahlavi government, the first Iranian modern centralized state. In this way, the book seeks to understand the process of gender and sexual transformation of Iranian society, the process which resulted in the production of deviants and negative gender and sexual lives.

Being the first archaeological research on gender by native archaeologists, the authors state the fact that this book investigates the politics of gender while many other aspects of gender remain still uninvestigated.

Tehran's Archaeology of Garbage project was conducted in 2017-2018 and with the initial aim of monitoring the impacts of currency devaluation on poor people. In Districts 7 and 17, the team investigated two of the most decayed urban fabrics of Tehran as well as the garbage bags of 1004 poor marginalized families. Among these, we managed to find evidence of a forgotten social group, the 'impoverished middle class' which consisted of people from the middle-class background who had to move to a neighborhood occupied by low-income classes. The garbage-making behaviors of these two communities were tracked and led to a better understanding of demographic changes and recent protests. In this article, I will present the evidence of poverty in District 17 and will open a new debate on the poor middle-class emerging community and its influence on the new identity of the people living in District 17.

The archaeology of garbage project was conducted in 2017-18 to investigate the daily garbage of inhabitants of two districts of Tehran. Among the discarded materials, we recognized scattered evidence of prostitutes’ daily life. Finding such evidence gave us an alibi to work on the historical documents in order to trace the patterns of prostitution in nineteenth-century Tehran. In this article, we configure “the geography of prostitution” and the politics of marginalization in the largest city of Iran through investigating the material culture found in garbage fills, surveying the city plan, photos, written documents, and archival data.

In an attempt at situating the experiences of common people within larger historical structures, this paper takes inspiration from innovative historiographical approaches, in particular "history from below". After introductory thoughts on the practice of writing history, we trace several distinct yet interconnected moments in the political history of Iran that have unfolded over the course of three generations. Our textual narrative is accompanied by an artistic rendering, which not only encourages readers to recognize different formats through which the past can be accessed, but also invites them to experience history as an accumulation of storylines. 

This paper discusses the emergence of an archaeology of the contemporary era in a Middle Eastern country, Iran. Far from North America and Europe, where the subfield was introduced, appreciated and developed by academic archaeologists, this archaeology is now also becoming established in Iran in spite of academic reluctance and (indirect) political pressure. The most encouraged form of archaeology in Iran remains nationalist and conservative, supported by the current political structures. However, the archaeology of the contemporary past is increasingly practised on a limited scale and has gradually extended its scope and subjects. Highly dependent on context, it has enriched the ways and methods of archaeological practice under dictatorship. The archaeology of the contemporary past is still in its infancy in the Middle East, but the pioneers of the subfield try to take up the challenges of smoothing the way for the future of this interdisciplinary archaeology in Iran and the Middle East. Iranian contemporary archaeology not only aims to investigate conflict, tensions and political (and armed) opposition, but also studies everyday life and disastrous contexts.

Politics of the past: The Representation of the Ancient Empires by Iran’s Modern States examines the highly problematic politics of the past surrounding the archaeology of ancient empires in Iran. Being indigenous, the authors regard the relations between archaeological remains, (negative) heritage, and modern strategies of suppression. The chapters provide a detailed analysis of how the practice of archaeology could be biased and ideologically charged. Discussing their own personal and professional experiences, the authors exemplify the real (ethical) dilemmas that archaeologists confront in the Middle East, calling for reflectivity and awareness among the archaeologists of the region. The text is accompanied by visual deconstruction of ancient rock reliefs to indicate the possibility of alternative histories.

On 26 December 2003, an earthquake in Bam, south-eastern Iran, resulted in an estimated death toll of 40,000. This article suggests that post-disaster burial practices provide alternative avenues for research, notably the changes in burial styles, grave markers and other material culture associated with burials. This article is the result of ethnoarchaeological research conducted on eight cemeteries in Bam, at intervals of 2, 6 and 17 months after the earthquake. The cemeteries chosen span a time period of 200 years prior to the disaster to 17 months after it, in order to track a wide range of long-term patterns. The post-disaster burial patterns are compared with those patterns prior to the disaster. We hope to demonstrate that the patterns present can be used to interpret burial practices under conditions such as natural disasters in archaeological contexts.