Biographical Memoirs Volume 89 (2007) / Chapter Skim
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ROBERT JOHN BRAIDWOOD
ROBERT JOHN BRAIDWOOD
Pages 22-43
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From page 23... ...
Robert John Braidwood was born on July 29, 1907, in Detroit, Michigan, a second-generation descendant of Scottish immigrants, both his mother's and his father's parents having come to the United States during the nineteenth century. As a boy, Bob Braidwood worked in his father's pharmacy after school and held occasional part-time jobs at a grocery store and a bank.
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From page 24... ...
Bob Braidwood's career in anthropological archaeology began shortly after he completed a degree in architecture at the University of Michigan in 1929 and spent several months in an architectural office. The impact of the Great Depression made a future in architecture highly problematic, so he returned to Michigan to undertake coursework in two other areas that had interested him as an undergraduate: ancient history and anthropology.
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From page 25... ...
Linda joined the Amuq field staff for the last Syrian season in 1938, and then both Braidwoods enrolled in graduate coursework during the fall term at the University of Chicago. Bob was pursuing a doctoral degree under the supervision of Henri Frankfort in the Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures at the Oriental Institute, but a third of his coursework was in the Department of Anthropology across the street from the institute on the main Chicago campus.
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From page 26... ...
These people were, for the most part, epigraphers and philologists who spent their research time transliterating, translating, and interpreting cuneiform or hieroglyphic writings recovered from an array of archaeological sites in western Asia and Egypt. Breasted also established a major field program with twelve archaeological expeditions working annually in five countries: Egypt (six expeditions)
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From page 27... ...
Perhaps the best aspect of this job was the agreement that every third year Bob was to be off campus and out of residence, digging at prehistoric sites in western Asia. ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIELDWORK IN THE NEAR EAST Braidwood's experience with the Syrian Expedition of the Oriental Institute was similar in some ways to his nine months with the Selucia project, in that the work of both was centered upon large-scale excavation of huge mounds (tells, tepes, or höyüks)
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From page 28... ...
Bob and Linda Braidwood and Abdullah al-Sudani worked together for the next 30 years, first in Syria, then in Iraq, where Abdullah was site supervisor and all-around facilitator for the Oriental Institute's Iraq-Jarmo Project. During the academic years from 1938 until the end of World War II, when the Braidwoods were graduate students at the University of Chicago, they participated in a seminar conducted by Bob Braidwood's dissertation professor, Henri Frankfort.
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From page 29... ...
This experience, together with his dissertation research on early deposits underlying the Amuq mounds, provided the data for Braidwood's production in 1945 of what he called "the gap chart," a chronological diagram he drew up as a pedagogical device that highlighted a significant lacuna (gap) spanning several thousand years between the last mobile Paleolithic hunter-gatherers camping in rockshelters, and the first appearance of the earliest agropastoral villages, such as those represented by the Amuq A phase, for example, and the site of Hassuna in northern Iraq (1946; Lloyd and Safar, 1945)
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From page 30... ...
Following information given them by the Directorate of Antiquities in Baghdad, they applied for and were granted an excavation permit for a site similar to Hassuna called Matarrah, and a sondage (test dig) permit for a second site, Jarmo.
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From page 31... ...
With the support of a new government research-funding agency, the National Science Foundation, Bob Braidwood assembled the first interdisciplinary team to address agropastoral origins on the ground in the Near East. Besides Wright the geologist, this group included paleoethnobotanist Hans Helbaek, zoologist Charles Reed, and radiocarbon expert Fred Matson, as well as several archaeologists (Bob Braidwood and Linda Braidwood, Bruce Howe, and field assistants Vivian Broman and Patty Jo Andersen)
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From page 32... ...
. Another significant result of the Iranian Prehistoric Project was the work carried out elsewhere in Iran during several subsequent seasons by two young staff members of the 19591960 Oriental Institute expedition, Frank Hole and Kent Flannery, who initiated their own research in the Deh Luran valley of southwestern Iran in 1961 (Hole et al., 1969)
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From page 33... ...
As had been the case in both Iraq and Iran, participation by these collaborative scientists was funded primarily by the National Science Foundation. Çambel and the Braidwoods continued research at Çayönü until 1989, when Halet retired, and the Joint Prehistoric Project directorship was turned over to a former student of hers, Professor Mehmet Özdogan of Istanbul University.
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From page 34... ...
The chronological sequence he delineated when a young staff member of the Oriental Institute Syrian Expedition, for example, has stood the test of time admirably, and is still centrally referred to in discussions of prehistory, protohistory, and early Bronze Age archaeology in the Levant. His survey of the Amuq plain and the regional perspective from which the survey derived were highly innovative at a time when virtually the entire field of Near Eastern archaeology centered upon site-oriented research: major excavations by hundreds of loosely supervised workers at very large mounds, preferably sites that were mentioned in the Bible or in cuneiform, hieroglyphic, or other archives of the Bronze and Iron ages.
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From page 35... ...
Bob and Linda Braidwood were an archaeological team without parallel in their dedication to answering the questions that caught Bob's imagination in his student days at Michigan, when he first read the speculative writings of V Gordon Childe, and then again in 1945 when his gap chart so clearly displayed a total lack of archaeological data about the critical portion of the post-Pleistocene record.
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See also "Archaeological Retrospect 2" (1981) , my biographical memoir for Robert John Braidwood in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol.
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, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago 1945 Permanent faculty position at the University of Chicago (Oriental Institute) 1948, 1950s Director of the Iraq-Jarmo Project fieldwork in northern Iraq 1959-1960 Director of the Iranian Prehistoric Project fieldwork in northwestern Iran 1960s-1980s Codirector, then advisor and consultant to the Turkish Prehistoric Project in southeastern Turkey 1978 Formal retirement from the Oriental Institute and Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago MEMBERSHIPS American Anthropological Association Archaeological Institute of America International Union of Pre- and Protohistoric Sciences Foreign correspondent or honorary fellow of the following: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, Institut de France Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut Osterreicheschie Akademie der Wissenschaften Instituto Italiana di Preistoria e Protostoria Jysk Arkaeologisk Selskab Kungl.
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Lit. OTHER AWARDS AND HONORS 1963 Elected to American Philosophical Society 1964 Elected to National Academy of Sciences 1966 Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1971 American Anthropological Association Distinguished Lecturer 1971 Archaeological Institute of America Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement 1982 Festschrift, The Hilly Flanks and Beyond: Essays on the Prehistory of Southwestern Asia, presented to Robert J
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From page 39... ...
J Near Eastern Stud.
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J Near Eastern Stud.
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From page 41... ...
1957 Jericho and its setting in Near Eastern history. Antiquity 31:73-81.
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From page 42... ...
68:1236-1240. 1973 Archaeology: View from southwestern Asia.
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From page 43... ...
British Archaeo logical Reports International Series 138. Oxford: British Archaeo logical Reports.
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