This volume contains the final report of a rescue excavation carried out in 2005 and 2006 in Fars, Southern Iran. The international rescue excavation programme was started in 2005, when it appeared that the area of Tang-e Bolaghi, a short distance from the important Achaemenid site of Pasargadae, was to be submerged by the creation of an artificial lake. Joint teams of Iranian and foreign archaeologists were set up to focus on the different chronological periods of human occupation evidenced bythe first surface survey of 2004. The Iranian-Italian Joint Team was assigned two sites of the Achaemenid and Post-Achaemenid periods (ca. 6th to 1st centuries BC). In the three campaigns of stratigraphic excavations, very important evidence of rural settlements was brought to light in two sites, TB76 and TB77. They are the first documented sites of rural occupation in the Achaemenid period, an age hitherto known mainly through the imperial monuments of Pasargadae, Persepolis and Susa. The results of the excavations threw light on the life of commoners in a rural environment, and produced evidence consistent with the Elamite administrative documents found at Persepolis. The text of the volume is divided into three parts, regarding respectively the excavations at the two sites and the materials found in them. It is supplemented by a rich photographic and graphic documentation of the excavations, and the objects and ceramics found. A number of colour plates are also included for ceramic and archaeometric analyses.

AUTHOR
Alireza Askari Chaverdi is the Iranian director of the Iranian-Italian Joint Archaeological Mission, a professor at the Department of History and Archaeology, Shiraz University, and Vice-Chancellor of the newly created Shiraz University of Arts. He has carried out several excavations in the province of Fars, focusing on the Achaemenid to the Sasanian periods. Under the Iranian-Italian Joint Archaeological Mission, he has co-directed the project “From Palace to Town” since 2008, aiming to expandknowledge of the inhabited town located near the Imperial Citadel of Persepolis; since 2011 the project has been working on a monumental gate of the Early Achaemenid period discovered at Tol-e Ajori, 3.5 km to the West of Persepolis. He has published four monographs and several articles on the archaeology and art of Pre-Islamic Iran. Pierfrancesco Callieri is the Italian director of the Iranian-Italian Joint Archaeological Mission and a professor at the Department for Cultural Heritage, University of Bologna. He studied Buddhist archaeology and then the archaeology of inhabited settlement in the Swat Valley of Northern Pakistan before moving (in 2005) to Fars, Iran. Under the Iranian-Italian Joint Archaeological Mission, he has also co-directed the project “From Palace to Town”. He has published four monographs and more than 150 articles on the archaeology and art of the region from Syria to Northern India during the pre-Islamic historic periods.