Toby Harnell, the American co-director of the team, said on Saturday that they had found evidence of settlements which seem to be villages.

“Covering two to six hectares, the villages date back to the Sasanid and early Islamic eras. The new discovery will help shed light on the history and lifestyles of the people of ancient times and complete the geographical and archaeological maps of the region,” he added.

The archaeologists have also collected over 2000 shards in the region, according to Ali Asadi, the Iranian co-director of the team.

Toby Harnell is a graduate student in Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

The institute had begun working on ancient Iranian sites such as Persepolis from the 1930s, but the collaboration was interrupted after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The institute resumed occasional cooperation two years ago with the help of the Chicago-based Iranian professor Abbas Alizadeh.

The director of the institute, Gil Stein, has traveled to Iran twice in the past two years to discuss methods of cooperation with Iranian cultural officials.

Last year, the institute returned a set of 300 ancient tablets to Iran. The tablets, which provide details of the inner workings of the administration of the ancient Persian Empire, are among a group of tens of thousands of tablets and tablet fragments that were loaned to the institute in 1937.