263 Introduction Archaeology is an imported commodity in Iran (Pa- poli & Garazhian 2012). It was brought to Iran by Naser al din Shah (Fig. 1) among other modern elements, such as photography (Amanat 1997) and theatre. Three de- cades after the frst contracts of the Qajarid kings with French antiquarians (Karimi 2013), Iran had the oppor- tunity to educate its own archaeological experts in Te- hran University (Karamati 2012). Before this change, they authorised the Antiquities Law, which legitimised governmental control of cultu- ral heritage. By empowering the Pahlavi dynasty, ar- chaeology was reduced to cultural heritage and to a governmental organisation (Moosavi 1990)—a tool employed until today to protect state political identity, which has reduced Iranian archaeologists to experts su- pervising foreign excavations. Rereading the materialis- tic heritage in Iran is absolutely a governmental matter, with the government able to apply archaeology as a political means (Goode 2009). Aside from direct propaganda related to historical eras, both the Pahlavi kings (Asgharzadeh 2007) and Islamic republic regime are more eager to concentrate on prehistory. This was the very means used by archaeo- logists to resist governmental pressures, who are cons- 22. UNDER THE UMBRELLA OF NEOLIBERALISM: IRANIAN ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE REDUCTION OF CULTURAL DIVERSITY Leila Papoli-Yazdi & Omran Garazhian