Spatial Analysis Applied to Archaeological Sites in the Bastam Plain, Northeast of Iran

The comprehensive study of interactions between environment and humans is very interesting in order to build up a good picture about geographical and cultural landscape. to obtain the visibility, the site location modeling, and patterning of archaeological data and extract settlement patterns in the bastam plain,  gis spatial analysis methods have been applied accordingly. some environmental factors around archaeological sites have been extracted to identify the local characteristics of the landscape that may have influenced the particular location of the ancient settlements and archaeological visibility. the final results of site probability modelling were obtained based on the environmental factors. according to these variables, 5 types of probability were evaluated for the location of archaeological sites (very high probability, high probability, medium probability, low probability and very low probability). the simple, visual evaluation of the results indicates that 70% of the archaeological sites felt within the very high probability, 20% in the high probability and 10% in the medium probability zones in the corresponding predictive map. based on the current field research (which is not sufficient to get the reliable results) and previous archaeological projects it would be argued that the phase of early village settlement in the area, including the neolithic and chalcolithic periods appears to have been dense. in turn, bronze age settlements appear to have been sparse. however, these observed patterns may not reflect the true insights due to the small scale survey, thick sedimentation and the relative dearth of sites in the alluvial plains.