Listed by UNESCO as part of the World Heritage Site “Bam and its Cultural Landscape”, it can be traced back to at least the Achaemenid Empire (sixth to fourth centuries BC).

Expectations about attributes and behaviours appropriate to women or men and about the relations between women and men – in other words, gender – are shaped by culture. Gender (like race or ethnicity) functions as an organizing principle for society because of the cultural meanings given to being male or female.

The National Park Service defines a cultural landscape as a geographic area, including both cultural and natural resources and the wildlife or domestic animals therein, associated with a historic event, activity, or person, or exhibiting other cultural or aesthetic values.

The National Park Service recognizes thirteen types of landscape characteristics that can potentially be found in any cultural landscape:

1. NATURAL SYSTEMS AND FEATURES.
2. SPATIAL ORGANIZATION.
3. LAND USE.
4. CIRCULATION.
5. CULTURAL TRADITIONS.
6. TOPOGRAPHY.
7. VEGETATION.
8. CLUSTER ARRANGEMENT.

According to its broad conception, cultural landscape is understood in contrast to natural landscape, as a landscape or area “bearing the imprint more or less of human activity,” or as “any landscape which is visibly influenced by human interference” (Jones 1988: 154).

Natural Environment Such an environment exists even in man’s absence. Natural landscape is one that is not affected by human activities. There is no place on earth that has remained undisturbed by the human activities. Human beings are also a part of Bio-diversity.

Mountain landscapes are formed by tectonic plates on the Earth’s surface pushing against each other. This movement and pressure causes the shape of the land to change. The land is pushed up in a vertical direction and over time forms mountains. Mountains rise high above their surroundings.

Many human activities increase the rate at which natural processes, such as weathering and erosion, shape the landscape. The cutting of forests exposes more soil to wind and water erosion. Pollution such as acid rain often speeds up the weathering, or breakdown, of the Earths rocky surface.

Since the beginning of human development, valleys have been an important place for people because of their presence close to rivers. Rivers enabled easier movement and also provided resources like water, good soils, and food such as fish.

Rivers begin high up in the mountains so they flow quickly downhill eroding the landscape vertically. The river cuts a deep notch down into the landscape using hydraulic action, when the sheer force of the water gets into small cracks and breaks down the sides of the river valley.

A basin is a depression or hollow on the earth’s surface, which is surrounded by higher land. A valley is also a depression or hollow between hills, mountains and uplands. A valley formed out of glaciers is usually U-shaped. …

Basins are formed by forces above the ground (like erosion) or below the ground (like earthquakes). They can be created over thousands of years or almost overnight. The major types of basins are river drainage basins, structural basins, and ocean basins.

River Basin: All the area drained by a river and its tributaries. Catchment area: It refers to all the area of land over which rain falls and is caught to serve a river basin.

The sedimentary rocks are deposited by weathering of preexisting rock with various weathering agencies in different grain sizes and their transportation to the place of deposition. The motion of these plates in geological history is responsible for the formation of major sedimentary basins all over the world.

Category-I: Basins, which have reserves and already producing. • Category-II: Basins, which have contingent resources pending commercial production. • Category-III Basins, which have prospective resources awaiting discovery.

1.1 The official definition of a sedimentary basin is: a low area in the Earth’s crust, of tectonic origin, in which sediments accumulate. The essential element of the concept is tectonic creation of relief, to provide both a source of sediment and a relatively low place for the deposition of that sediment.