vigorously than anywhere else in western Asia. There was a virtual explosion of international activity with expeditions from Britain, the United States, canada, West Germany, France, sweden, italy, japan, belgium, and denmark. In 1976, for example, there were seventeen archaeological surveys and thirty excavation projects. By 1978, the number of foreign expeditions in Iran had risen to over fifty, the majority of them being major projects. For the first time, some balance was achieved in chronological coverage, at least in western Iran, and other previously neglected areas began to be explored.

Though some important achievements occurred in Paleolithic studies, this subfield continued to lag. Iran’s great environmental diversity and complex geography of deserts, mountain valleys, and coastal plains are reflected in the numerous cultural adaptations in prehistory. For this reason, archaeologists have eschewed syntheses of larger areas and time periods in favor of constructing prehistoric regional sequences (see Voigt and Dyson 1992). This period also saw the introduction of modern excavation standards and close attention to stratigraphy, so necessary when dissecting complex mound settlements, and, by the mid-1960s, the impact of the theoretical and methodological innovations of “the new archaeology.” In addition, there was a rapid and intense development of surface survey strategies, perhaps more so than anywhere else in western Asia. This was inspired by gordon willey’s virú valley project in peru in 1953 and the extensive surveys conducted in both Iraq and Khuzistan by robert mccormick adams.

Survey data were used to identify administrative hierarchies; stylistic, functional, and chronological variability; trading networks; population dynamics; and so forth through the employment of such methods as gravity modeling, rank size indexing, cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling, and statistical analysis. A number of important ethno-archaeological projects were also conducted, especially Patty Jo Watson’s and Carol Kramer’s separate studies of two villages in central-west Iran. There was a notable increase of fieldwork done by the IAS as well as an increase in the number of Iranians being trained not only in Iran but also in Europe and North America. In 1958, Ezatollah Negahban, himself a graduate of the OIC, created the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Tehran. The institutional framework was further strengthened with the appearance of the Iranian Centre for Archaeological Research (ICAR), directed by Firouz Bagherzadeh, and also the National Organization for Restoration of Historical Monuments. By 1961, both the British Institute of Persian Studies and a German institute had been opened in Tehran, and the American Institute of Iranian Studies was opened soon afterward. Specialized journals appeared, especially Iran (1962), Iranica Antiqua (1965), Archaologische Mitteillungen aus Iran, new series (1967), and Cahiers de la Délégation Archéologique Française en Iran (1971), and in addition, numerous international colloquia, symposia, conferences, and exhibitions were organized.

History of Paleolithic Research in Iran

Because of the relative lack of overlap between Paleolithic research and that of later periods, the history of Paleolithic archaeology in Iran is most effectively dealt with separately. Compared to other areas of western Asia, Paleolithic research in Iran was very late to develop. Stone tools were recovered from a Pleistocene context near the Caspian Sea in the late nineteenth century by de Morgan, and further discoveries were reported from river terraces in Seistan. De Morgan’s belief that, during the Pleistocene, the mountains and plateaus of Iran would have been uninhabitable possibly dissuaded further interest. Indeed, much of the country is at such a high altitude that it is likely that the entire Paleolithic sequence of Iran will be consistently marked by hiatuses around glacial maxima.

dorothy garrod’s pioneering research in southern Iraqi Kurdistan in 1928 documented Lower, Middle, and Upper Paleolithic occupations at the surface site of Chemchemal and in the caves of Zarzi and Hazar Merd near Sulaimaniya, and it was expected that similar evidence would be discovered in Iran. In 1934, Middle Paleolithic flints were recovered near Shiraz in Fars Province, and Herzfeld, in the first published synthesis of Iranian archaeology,