1.3. Farhad
Farhad is the name of a rocky hill rising some 55 m above the mean sea level, located 3.5 km south of the port of Berbera and today lying next to the main asphalted road leading to the interior. The site extends from the northeastern slope of the hill and along the adjacent plain. We surveyed it in 2017, shortly upon its discovery by a local representative of the Ministry of Culture, as the place was being destroyed by a quarry. A second visit in 2020 showed that the quarry had progressed and most of the slope was destroyed, but the main damage came from the construction of a building and a concrete fence that now covers almost the entire site. The name of the place is Persian and probably ancient. The outcrop is very prominent in the landscape and serves as a landmark for both sailors and people coming from the interior of the country. It was indeed used as a navigational reference until colonial times (Red Sea Pilot 1900: 380). The artifact scatter occupies around five hectares of flat land to the south of the outcrop, as well as its foothills (Fig. 17). The size is, however, misleading, since the main concentration of materials occurs in around two hectares. Besides, although the site covers more space in the plain than in the hill, finds in the latter were more abundant (we collected 197 sherds in the outcrop versus 85 in the plain), perhaps because the surface was more disturbed. In the plain, we found a place where the sandy topsoil had been removed and where ashes and charcoal appeared mixed with minute pottery, glass and animal bones. We cleared a surface of around 1 × 1 m and exposed the remains of a hearth which lied only 0.1 m underneath the surface. No permanent structure seems to have existed in the plain or the slope at any point. A fort, however, was constructed in the hilltop at an uncertain time—perhaps the Ottoman period. The only remnant visible today is a rock-hewn cistern. Some of the late materials which appeared on the slope may be associated with the fort, including Khunj pottery and a shisha decorated with stamp impressions, which can be dated to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During the survey we distinguished only two zones: the slope of the rocky hill and the plain. Within the plain there is a central area with a denser concentration of artifacts, but no zoning or activity areas could be observed on the surface as in Siyaara or Bandar Abbas. Although the period of occupation largely overlaps with Siyaara (between the thirteenth/fourteenth and early nineteenth century), the ceramic assemblages are surprisingly divergent, as we will see.
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