Archival Research
Identifying, cataloguing and verifying historical records relating to Turk communities, using academic method.
Research areas
Archives of the Turks of Iran
Records of the Turk dynasties of Iran — Safavid, Afsharid and Qajar — and of Iran’s Turk communities, among them Azerbaijani Turks, Afshars, Qashqai, Khorasan Turks, Turkmens and Khalaj.
- Royal decrees (farmans), charters and land grants
- Tax, census and tribal settlement registers
- Chronicles and manuscripts, such as Mirza Mahdi Khan Astarabadi’s history of Nader Shah
Soviet-era & Cyrillic sources
Records of deportation, resettlement and community life in the Soviet period.
- Deportation and special-settlement registers
- Local administrative and census records
- Press and publications in Cyrillic scripts
East Asian & regional sources
Comparative study of regional archives and published sources in several scripts.
- Chinese, Russian and Persian-language materials
- Missionary and travellers’ accounts
- Regional newspapers and gazettes
Oral history
Recording and archiving community members’ testimony with explicit consent.
- Life-story interviews
- Place names and family memory
- Consent and access terms recorded with every interview
Heritage inventory
Documenting tangible and intangible heritage in a structured, citable form.
- Monuments, sites and objects
- Music, ritual, craft and foodways
- Rights and credits for every image or recording
Research principles
- We work only from sources that can be cited and, where possible, consulted by others.
- Personal and family records are treated as sensitive data and are never published without consent.
- We distinguish clearly between a document, our reading of it, and its level of verification.
Collection catalogues
In preparation
Catalogue records are in preparation. Each record will be published with its reference, source and verification status.
Verification policy
Every published archival record states its holding institution, document reference, review date and level of verification. Records found to be wrong are updated with a correction note.
Read the methodology