| Summary: | The aim of this paper is to examine the interactions
between people and the natural environment against a background of climatic change. The
focus of attention is on the Bampur Valley, which is located in the global transitional
climatic area. During the fourth and third millennium BCE, an important urban society,
which was in close economic contacts with the urban societies of the Sistan Basin,
Jiroft, Soghan Valley, the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia, emerged in this Bampur Valley
along the river bed of the Bampur River. This Valley, which is located along the main
natural overland trade routes, not only developed as intermediary for long-distance
trade between east and west but also functioned as an important industrial and
economical pole in southeast Iran. It is argued that the global
transitional climate area, which is generally located between tropical and subtropical
areas, has constantly been faced with periodical changes including dry and humid during
worm period. Based on the archaeological and environmental evidence, with reference to
uniformitarianism theory and with using GIS, it will be attempted to evaluate movement,
collapse and interaction between settlements and natural environment in the Bampur
Valley. The disciplines of archaeology and geography have much in common, being concern
respectively with the spatial and temporal dimensions of the human condition.
Archaeology deals with those aspects of the human past which are mainly elucidated using
material remains rather than written sources. The prime concern of geography is to
understand the processes that operate within the natural environment (physical
geography) and to evaluate the ways in which people interact both with their environment
and with each other (human geography). Evidence discovered from the archaeological and
geographical surveys carried out in the area between 2002 and 2005 by authors testify to
environmental changes, which caused instability and collapse of the human communities in
prehistoric and the present times in the Bampur Valley.'
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