Bruce Howe – författare

The Paleolithic site of Barda Balka ("standing stone," "stone to lean upon" in local Kurdish) is situated about 3 kilometers northeast of Chemchemal in Kirkuk Province, Iraq. Until recent years, the site was marked by a natural monolith of limestone conglomerate 3.5 meters high on a rather barren slope partly littered with Acheulean-type bifaces, pebble tools, cores, and flake artifacts. The site was discovered in 1949 by members of the Directorate General of Antiquities of Iraq while on archaeological reconnaissance in the district. In 1951, during a field season of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago under the direction of Robert J. Braidwood (which not only conducted the excavations at nearby Jarmo and Karim Shahir but also carried out wider geological and prehistoric reconnaissance in the extended Chemchemal Valley area), Barda Balka was visited and further studied by Herbert E. Wright Jr. of the University of Minnesota Department of Geology and Bruce Howe, then of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. Wright and Howe returned shortly thereafter to conduct a four-day sounding campaign of trenching and localized geological investigations. This volume is Howe's final report of these investigations at Barda Balka.

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].