Decolonizing Iran: a tentative note on inter-subaltern colonialism

This paper investigates the ways in which the nationalist narrative of the statist archaeology in Iran has contributed to the dominant nationalist discourse in systematic attempts to erase any evidence of the existence of a “non-Aryan” past in the Iranian plateau. Sponsored by the state, ethnoracial archaeological studies in Iran have functioned as a powerful instrument for constructing a desired past, one that is informed by Persianist primordial nationalism. To justify the state’s concurrent homogenization policies, Iranian archaeology has ascribed a sole historical agency to the Persian ethnie. Iranian archaeological studies have been employed by the Persianist intelligentsia and the state for propagating the idea of the singularity of “the nation”—one in which nonsovereign communities have no history, identity, or culture. Building on emergent decolonized literature on archaeology, this paper aims to interrogate some of the fundamental premises of nationalist archaeological studies in Iran.