Seventh, members of the National Organizing Committee serve for five years and are responsible for organizing the next international congress. The Permanent Council elects the secretary of the National Organizing Committee, and its members are the Permanent Council members of the country hosting the next congress.

Over the years, a number of special committees have been created to organize projects of international importance, and many of them still continue. Several of these special committees have built up an imposing group of specialists and are responsible for a long list of publications. In addition, some twenty scientific commissions have been incorporated into the organization of the U.I.S.P.P. to coordinate research in specific areas of pre- and proto-history, which can be thematic, regional or interregional, chronological, interdisciplinary, etc. Finally, several international associations have become affiliated with the UISPP, through which they have access to the CIPSH. All of the special committees, scientific commissions, and other organizations meet regularly during congresses and in symposia, colloquiums, and conferences, and the results of their work are generally published, sometimes in multivolume proceedings, sometimes in less ambitious collections of papers.

To conclude, I quote part of the Preamble to statutes of the UISPP, in which the international union clearly proclaims its scientific aims and philosophical convictions:

The U.I.S.P.P. is an international association of scholars; the universality of Science is the philosophical basis of its activities. Its aim being the collaboration of the scholars from all countries to help advance prehistoric and protohistoric studies, it proclaims its total attachment to academic freedom.

Knowledge of Humanity concerns all present-day societies. For this reason, the U.I.S.P.P. is in total opposition to any form of discrimination based upon the concepts of race, ethnic group, geographical unit, philosophical conviction, nationality, sex, language or any other; such discrimination being, by its intolerance and its very definition, the negation itself of any form of co-operation. The U.I.S.P.P. excludes no bona fide scholar from its scientific activities.

(Bulletin of the XIII Congress of the International Union of the Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, Forli, Italy, 1996, 34–38).

Jacques Nenquin

Iran

No comprehensive history of archaeology in Iran exists though there are a few summaries about specific aspects (e.g., Amiet, Chevalier, and Carter 1992; Dyson 1968; Moorey 1972; Young 1986) and a few autobiographies (Dieulafoy 1888, 1890; Ghirshman 1970; Goff 1980). There are also important recent syntheses and collections of articles (Hole 1987; Olszewski and Dibble 1993; Smith 1986; Voigt and Dyson 1992), a basic bibliography for the prehistoric periods (Voigt and Dyson 1992), virtually exhaustive bibliographies for all periods (Van den Berghe 1966, 1979; Van den Berghe and Haerinck 1981), and an archaeological tour of Iran (Matheson 1972).

Historical Overview

Archaeology in Iran has developed unevenly in terms of periods and regions studied. The earliest archaeological investigations, from the late nineteenth century onward, concentrated on western and southwestern Iran, and this pattern has largely persisted. This emphasis is primarily owing to the facts that these areas had the strongest interaction with mesopotamia; they were the homeland of historically important civilizations such as Elam and Achaemenid Persia, which were of greatest interest to western scholars; and access to them was relatively easier. In addition, the discipline has been compartmentalized chronologically, and with some exceptions, researchers fall into one of three groups: those few who have studied the relatively neglected Paleolithic period, the majority who have focused on the Neolithic to the Achaemenid periods, and another smaller group of people who have concerned themselves with the post-Achaemenid and Islamic periods.

Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century archaeology in Iran can be reasonably characterized