Research

Topics
Archaeology, cultural heritage, and museums—geopolitics, world systems, and cross-cultural exchange; archaeology and colonialism— collections research—historical political economy of archaeological fieldwork
Fields
Bronze Age Archaeology of Iran—Iranian Studies—History and Sociology of Science—Digital Humanities

Book Project

American Archaeologists in Iran, Iranian Antiquities in America:
the past, present, and future of heritage diplomacy

In my thesis research, I examined the geographic organization of communities and polities in in Iran and Central Asia ca. 3200-1600 BCE and showed how then as now, Iran occupied a key strategic position within geopolitics; powers small and large, local and extra-local, sought access to the trade routes and resources of the Iranian plateau, with wide-ranging consequences for all parties involved. While archaeology provides a window to the distant past of diplomacy, exchange, and conflict, the construction of this knowledge itself has proven to be an illuminating lens to observe the more recent history of these forces in the present. This book project, therefore, not only shows what the history of archaeological diplomacy reveals about bilateral US-Iranian relations, but also examines how the discipline of archaeology has been involved in histories of colonialism, extractivism, and great power conflicts. Considering the poor state of diplomacy between the two nations today, the question of how to relate in the present and future to our shared histories, produced over the course of eight fraught decades and materially constituted in divided collections, has never been more important.

This research is empirically grounded in the archives and collections of the major universities, museums, and foundations that sponsored American archaeological expeditions to Iran from 1930 to the present. I am especially interested in negotiations over the issuance of survey and excavation permits, partage (i.e., the practice of dividing excavated finds), and the terms of access to archaeological collections located in the US and Iran for different groups of scholars over time.

I see this project as a lens to both understand the historical relationship between American cultural heritage professionals and their Iranian counterparts and also as the warrant for rebuilding these relationships across the partage divide. Concurrent with the writing of this monograph, I am building a collaborative collections research network to create a bilingual digital infrastructure to re-unite these divided collections. Thus, through this project, I intend to both illuminate the past and contribute to the present and future of scientific diplomacy between our two countries.

Dissertation

Models of Trade and Polity Formation
in Bronze Age Northeastern Iran, ca. 3200-1600 BCE

A persistent hypothesis in the archaeology of complex societies posits that the acquisition of raw materials for craft production underpins the emergence of first the division of labor, then the emergence of social stratification, followed by the development of political institutions, and ultimately, state formation. In cases where such raw materials—especially those needed for the fashioning of status symbols—are not available locally, self-aggrandizing leaders and aspiring elites will seek to create or otherwise manipulate long distance flows of such materials to either acquire the status symbols or to furnish the craft industries which they control. While this theory has for decades been the subject of debate and revision according to theoretical and methodological fashions, its fundamental premises have nevertheless achieved a level of disciplinary common-sense. So much so in fact, that interregional trade is seen by many scholars as an unquestionably key variable in polity formation, especially in the case of so-called “secondary” polity-formation.

Through a case study based on the Gorgan Plain in northeastern Iran focusing on the chronological interval between the Late Chalcolithic and the Late Bronze Age (ca. 3200-1600 BCE), I show that increases in interregional trade do not always precede the process of polity formation. Indeed, the opposite is not only possible, but common. Through a hybrid methodology—examining the historiography of macro-historical narratives of the relationship between interregional trade and Bronze Age political geography in Iran, synthesizing underutilized survey and excavation data, conducting a virtual site survey in Google Earth, and modeling polity organization—I show that the period in which the Gorgan Plain was most involved in interregional trade in fact follows a period of polity formation. Moreover, this period is instead correlated with what all previous scholars have considered to be a phase of polity disintegration and collapse. Furthermore, I argue that at each stage in the sequence of Bronze Age polity formation, the political geography of this region was much more varied than previously assumed. Together, these results call into question models of secondary or proto-state formation across the broader region of the lands between Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Amu Darya. My intervention destabilizes the connection between long-distance trade and polity formation and demonstrates the need for updated models of both phenomena in Near Eastern archaeology specifically, and in anthropological archaeology more broadly.