Gürsan-Salzmann, The New Chronology of the Bronze Age Settlement of Tepe Hissar, Iran. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2016. Pp. 408, 238 illus. ISBN 9781934536834 (Cloth); ISBN 9781934536841

Abstract

Tepe Hissar is an iconic site in the prehistory of lran. The long history of archaeological research at the site began with excavations by Eric Schmidt in the 1930s, on behalf of the Penn Museum, which unearthed deep Bronze Age occupational sequences and more than 1600 burials, some with rich assemblages of grave goods. A second phase of excavation on behalf of the Penn Museum was undertaken by Robert Dyson in the 1970s, in order to clarify aspects of Schmidt's earlier work, particularly the chronology, and the site has also witnessed smaller scale excavations and surface surveys by Iranian teams since the 1990s. The present volume bears the weight of this earlier work, taking on the challenge of revising the overall site chronology, the ceramic sequence, and especially the relative and absolute dating of the very rich burial record. The volume is abundantly illustrated with photographs, drawings, plans and sections in black and white and greyscale, although inevitably these are insufficient for a full, stand-alone judgement of the author's revised stratigraphic interpretations; the main text and multiple appendices of the new volume regularly cross reference Schmidt's and Dyson's volumes, and are best read with those works close to hand.