Humanities

The history of the establishment of archeology in Iran dates back to 935 when it was founded at the Faculty of Literature and Humanities of the University of Tehran; nevertheless, for the first time, the Foundation of Archeology Department with three sub-disciplines i.e. "prehistoric archeology", "historical archeology" and " Islamic era Archeology" was established in 1989 at the Faculty of Humanities of Tarbiat Modares University.
Archaeology in short can be defined as the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts and cultural landscapes. In a more literal statement, this field of science has focused its studies on the past and the changes of those societies during quite long periods. Iranian archeology can be divided into three periods of study.

1. Prehistoric Archeology which concerns itself with societies that did not have writing systems.
2. Historical Archaeology which studies the period in which its events are recorded by the writing.
3. Archeology of the Islamic era which focuses on the events occurred after the collapse of the Sassanid Dynasty in Iran until Qajar era, each of the above main divisions has its own sub-divisions.

Archaeologists strive to rebuild human lifestyles on the basis of archaeological remains. In fact, the archaeologists try to investigate the past by asking logical questions and conducting the right scientific methods to find answers to such questions. From this perspective, archeology is first of all the history of ideas, hypotheses, and ways to look back. The beginning of archaeological activity in Iran goes back to the growing efforts of Western orientalists in different parts of the country who were striving to obtain historical monuments in order to store them in European museums or add them to their private collections. Learning from the experience of Western archeological studies, Iranian archeologists changed their exploration methods and information classification at the beginning of the 20th century. The use of results obtained by other fields of study such as geography, aerial photography, historical geography, human and economic sciences, the use of radiocarbon dating to track the findings, radiation measurements, etc., became very common and a prerequisite for early research (field survey study) and scientific research. It has been a long time since the scholars of all sciences have admitted that our age is a multifaceted and interdisciplinary era when a one-dimensional view has its deficiencies, deficiencies which can be removed by taking a holistic and comprehensive view of science. With the prosperity and expansion of interdisciplinary studies, archaeological science also expanded its field of research and began to make use of numerous disciplines such as "genetics", "bone science" and "botany" and new theoretical approaches such as "semiotics" "iconography", "iconology", "history of cultural studies", "ancient pattern" attractor and many methods of analytical elemental (spectrometric) analyzes, such as XRF, XRD, PIXE.
The Department of Archeology at Tarbiat Modares University has tried to pay special attention to qualitative research in order to keep pace with the tremendous developments taking place in this field, and it constantly modifies the syllabus and curriculum of the courses presented in the department to achieve its mission. The department now offers graduate and postgraduate programs in the above-mentioned sub-disciplines. The teaching staff of the department consists of four faculty members, one of whom is a full-professor and 3 others are associate professors.