Now Available: Archaeology of Elam, Second Edition

Elam was an important state in southwestern Iran from the third millennium BC to the appearance of the Persian Empire and beyond. Less well-known than its neighbors in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, the Levant or Egypt, it was nonetheless a region of extraordinary cultural vitality. This book examines the formation and transformation of Elam's many identities through both archaeological and written evidence, and brings to life one of the most important regions of Western Asia, re-evaluates its significance, and places it in the context of the most recent archaeological and historical scholarship. The new edition includes material from over 800 additional sources, reflecting the enormous amount of fieldwork and scholarship on Iran since 1999. Every chapter contains new insights and material that have been seamlessly integrated into the text in order to give the reader an up-to-date understanding of ancient Elam.

The Archaeology of Elam: Formation and Transformation of an Ancient Iranian State, 2nd Edition, is now available for purchase through the Cambridge University Press website as part of the Cambridge World Archaeology. 

Daniel T. Potts is Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology and History at ISAW. He received his AB (1975) and PhD (1980) in Anthropology from Harvard, specializing in Near Eastern archaeology. He taught previously at the Freie Universität Berlin (1981-86), the University of Copenhagen (1980-81, 1986-1991) and the University of Sydney (1991-2012) where he held the Edwin Cuthbert Hall Chair of Middle Eastern Archaeology. His main areas of interest are Iran, Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf and as a field archaeologist he has conducted excavations in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. The founding editor-in-chief of the journal Arabian Archaeology & Epigraphy, he is a Corresonding Member of the German Archaeological Institute and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.