The Bronze age center of Shahdad, SE Iran: "hollow" vs. nucleated early urban processes

Was ancient Shahdad a kind of "hollow city", or a "a succession of dense and functionally mixed districts, a sort of de-localised linear city centre" (sensu Stransky and Maupu 2014), with wide inner void spaces, rather than a dense nucleated early city? Or is its present surface record heavily patterned by post-depositional site formation processes? In 2016, the surface of the important site of Bronze age Shahdad, on the western edge of the Dasht-e Lut in central Iran, was systematically surveyed, and limited test trenching along its apparent periphery was carried out. Much future work is certainly needed, but ground testing revealed that the inhabited area of the 3rd millennium BC site is noticeably less extended than previously thought, and that the early Bronze age city may have developed out of a discontinuous network of individual residential communities (and not necessarily all coeval). The article also takes into account new views and new problems, in first place concerning the impact on the archaeological record of intensive erosion and one or more destructive floods, that may have locally sealed and protected, but also destroyed part of the settlement of the second half of the 3rd millennium BCE.