Archaeological Papers

Bayesian Radiocarbon Chronologies of Bronze Age Northeastern Iran and Southern Central Asia

Numerous sets of radiocarbon assays from key excavations across this region have been published and used in chronology-building, but their application and discussion in the field has been unsystematic. Even when these date ranges are calibrated, these determinations are prima facie unreliable, due in part to wide error ranges, lacunae in the reporting of sampled materials and contextual information, a large number of distinct radiocarbon laboratories involved, and the failure to take advantage of OxCal’s capacity to incorporate stratigraphic priors into the calibration procedure. In this article, I will make two interventions that should resolve many inconsistencies in the absolute chronologies of northeastern Iran, southern and southeastern Turkmenistan, southern Uzbekistan, and northern Afghanistan: 1) collating all of the reported radiocarbon assays, including those previously only published in Russian and Farsi and thus not consulted in Euro-American scholarship, and 2) presenting the results of a phase-and-sequence constrained model, which provides a much more robust framework for reasoning about the absolute chronologies of these regions.

A New Type-Variety System for the Bronze Age Ceramics of the Gorgan Plain

The ceramic sequence of the Gorgan Plain has long been understood to be a key anchor-point for interregional culture historical studies, whether the objective is to cross-date new excavations or understand patterns of cultural interaction on the Iranian Plateau and beyond. Unfortunately, due to the incomplete nature of the (un)published record — fragmented as it is across manuscripts, reports, articles, monographs and grey literature written in English, French, Persian, Japanese — there has been no systematic regional synthesis, ultimately undermining the utility of these assemblages as anchors for other sequences and hampering the ability of contemporary surveyors of the region to accurately date sites based on surface ceramics. In this article, I will present not only the corrected set of precise parallels between the key excavations of the region, but also introduce a type-variety classification system. This classification scheme will facilitate future analyses by clarifying what types and varieties of ceramics are found in which contexts, affording for the first time the possibility of conducting contextually controlled analysis of any kind with these materials, including but not limited to synchronic and diachronic investigations of the distribution of style, function, and manufacturing technique.

Integration and Reanalysis of Legacy Regional Surveys

Regional comparative survey has been experiencing a renaissance in the past few years, partly as archaeologists become more accepting of and literate in the principles of open science, and partly due to the wide and easy availability of massive stores of satellite imagery. The survey equivalent to the curation crisis is the threat of wide-spread site destruction under the conditions of climate change, conflict, and development, among others. This article discusses the methods I developed in my dissertation and how they can be used most effectively to recover information from legacy regional surveys, conducted decades ago but left under-analyzed.

Historical Papers

The development of archaeological survey as a form of surveillance science

In Spring 1931, Frederick and Susanne Wulsin traveled by car from Tehran to Asterabad with Ernst Herzfeld to assess the state of the University of Pennsylvania Museum’s newly won archaeological concession to explore and excavate at Hecatompylos (Sad-Darvazeh), once a capitol of the Parthian empire, near the modern town of Damghan. They also visited a number of other sites across the region, documenting the area’s economic, social, infrastructural and climatic suitability for sustained archaeological exploration. While interesting for its many idiosyncrasies and historical anecdotes, this episode is significant because it represents the first of dozens of American archaeological surveys conducted in Iran, which continued until the eve of the Islamic Revolution. In this paper, I will trace the methodological evolution of American archaeological survey in Iran over this interval from the Wulsin-Herzfeld vehicle survey, through Robert McCormick Adams’ early landscape archaeology to William Sumner’s “full-coverage” approach in the 1970s, and contrast this trajectory with the strictly remote, satellite imagery and museum collection mediated present. This sequence of developments is not only important for understanding the history and sociology of archaeological field research, but also reveals key aspects of shifts in the use of different kinds of surveillance technology in the social sciences more broadly.

Regional Archaeology and River Basin Development: An Alternative Intellectual Genealogy in Disciplinary History

The conventional story of the emergence of regional archaeology traces its origins back to the dialectical resolution of contradictions internal to the intellectual environment of Americanist anthropological archaeology. On some level this is true, but only insofar as it elides the socio-political context of and material conditions that afforded the foundational studies that established this now common-place scale of analysis and body of method and theory within the field. At several crucial junctures during the mid-20th century, archaeology encountered and was forever changed by its engagements with regional-scale river-basin development projects. Looking solely at the Tennessee Valley Authority archaeology programs, among the results of these entanglements can be counted the Southeastern synthesis, the emergence of salvage archaeology, and the professionalization of the discipline, to name just a few. Taking a global perspective, however, reveals just how much the emergence of the regional paradigm in archaeology directly depended upon the sponsorship of fieldwork by American development agencies and consultants who spread river-basin development throughout the world during the early Cold War. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the career of Robert McCormick Adams, who in the mid-1950s was hired by the government of Iraq to provide a utilitarian answer as to why ancient states had been more successful at irrigating the desert margins than modern ones, and then was subsequently hired by the Development and Resources Corporation (DRC) to conduct similar research on behalf of the government of Iran in 1960-61. In this paper, I will introduce the relationship between Adams and the DRC and how his landmark publications from the 1960s—and subsequently all research following from these studies—were shaped by the encounter in the field between Adams and the American development corporate consultancy par excellence. The relationship between Adams and his DRC counterpart Leo Anderson had both synergies (e.g., expanding the range of data consulted by archaeologists and extending the spatial scope of archaeological studies) and dissonances (e.g., over the extent to which archaeological knowledge was useful in development planning). This encounter, with all of its accordances and antinomies, reveals the necessity of considering the intellectual history of archaeology in the social and political context in which trailblazing fieldwork was conducted.