The SHAHR-I SOKHTA ONLINE project. Many reasons for sharing the knowledge on the web 

The SHAHR-I SOKHTA ONLINE project, carried out by the Department of Archaeology of the University of Bologna, in collaboration with the IsIAO-Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente, is aimed at sharing via web the knowledge on the earlier historical phases of the Sistan area (Iran), whose main urban centre is Shahr-i Sokhta, the so-called "burnt city".

The history of the researches in that area is quite complex: the Italian Archaeological Mission in Iran (led by Prof. Maurizio Tosi, today full professor at the University of Bologna) worked in Shahr-i Sokhta between 1967 and 1978. The Islamic Revolution of 1978-1979 discontinued all the foreign research projects in Iran, but the amount of data collected in those ten years made possible to carry on the scientific research after the access to the site was denied.

The Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente (IsIAO) decided to keep the project alive, while different grants were made available over the years by different Italian governmental agencies, to ensure the necessary financial support. Thanks to this scientific and economic effort, the team of specialists working on Shahr-i Sokhta project was not scattered, and the work is going on till today.

The target of the present web portal is to help the international research groups working on the same area to share their data and scientific results, in order to improve the global knowledge of an fundamental stage of the human history in the Near East.

Leading partners: