University of Chicago. Oriental Institute

Robert John Braidwood

Cuyler Young

When editors of this volume began organizing a Festschrift in honor of Robert Braidwood, they hoped to interest scholars from a variety of different fields with a theme of the food-producing time range (10,000-4,000 B.C.). Many of the contributors have also incorporated in their discussions an important and controversial subject from Braidwood's large corpus of research, the development of agriculture. The first part of the volume is devoted to articles under the general heading of Syro-Palestine. The theories of spatial analysis are applied in several articles in the Mesopotamian section. Genevieve Dollfus, using Iranian sites of the fifth millennium such as Choga Mish, tries to make comparisons with patterns of land use and settlements from more contemporary periods. This Festschrift is as diverse and interesting as the multifaceted Robert Braidwood. [From a review by Margaret C. Brandt in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies 47 (1988) 294-96]

Essays on the Prehistory of Southwestern Asia Presented to Robert J. Braidwood, November 15, 1982

The Hilly Flanks and Beyond

Halet Çambel

Prehistoric research in southeastern Anatolia

Bruce Howe

The volume under review deals with the aims, methods, preliminary results and problems of three campaigns in Iraqi Kurdistan (1948, 1950-51, 1954-55). It does not offer a final excavation or exploration report, since some of the materials have not yet been studied in detail; but it contains a valuable series of essays about special aspects of the project which was undertaken as a first major attempt to identify the earliest village-materials and their immediate predecessors. The archaeological and general chapters to the book are the work of R. J. Braidwood and Bruce Howe. They explain the scene and progress of the field-work; they give a survey of the sites excavated and the materials collected (chapters I-V). The middle part of the book consists of contributions by the scientists who took an essential part in the field research: F. R. Matson writes on ceramic analysis and carbon 14 dating; H. E. Wright Jr. on climate and prehistoric man in the Eastern Mediterranean (a comparative study concerned with the entire Levant); H. Helbaek on the palaeo-ethnobotany of the Near East and Europe (an excellent chapter, most informative for the archaeologist in search of specific statements and analyses of early "agricultural" materials); and Charles A. Reed on animal domestication in the prehistoric Near East (again very instructive, often with an element of reproach directed to field archaeologists who neglected to recognize or salvage zoological evidence in their excavations). The concluding chapters review the results in a more general setting so far as they can be defined in chronological, "environmental" and general cultural terms and periods. [From a review by Machteld J. Mellink in the American Journal of Archaeology 65 (1961) 195-96].

Robert John Braidwood

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