Robert J Braidwood - Böcker

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 J. Braidwood set out with his wife Linda in the spring of 1948 to explore the field evidence for the transition from hunter-gatherer way of life to sedentary food production in the region surrounding the Mesopotamian Plain. This initial work started many archaeologists thinking about how the processes that lay behind this fundamental change, and ultimately other transitions, could be documented archaeologically. His pioneering effort to introduce specialists from the geological and biological sciences into work on relevant problems in this transition brought about a new set of standards for fieldwork in the Near East and a new appreciation of the richness of the multidimensional archaeological record that can result from these studies. This volume is the final report on the Braidwoods' initial phase of exploration from 1948 to 1955 in the Chemchemal Valley and adjacent regions of Iraqi Kurdistan. In this sense it is a work that can be viewed as the result of a study begun at a transition within archaeology itself, from the goals and techniques of the period between the wars to the methods and purposes that characterize the discipline at present. Approximately half the volume is devoted to reports on the architecture and artifacts recovered during three seasons of work at Jarmo, the first early village site with aceramic levels excavated in the Near East. Substantial sections are also devoted to reports on the earlier aceramic site of Karim Shahir and the later (Halafian) site of Banahilk. [From a review by Arthur J. Jelinek in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 265 (1987) 87-88].