Summer Scholarship: Dan Potts on Elam

Summers are often devoted to fieldwork but in some cases writing is on the agenda. Last year I was persuaded by Asya Graf, archaeology editor at Cambridge University Press, to undertake a revised edition of The Archaeology of Elam, a book that I published with them in 1999. By coincidence, the seminar that I taught at ISAW in the fall semester of 2013 was entitled ‘Iranian Archaeology in the 21^st century’, and in it we looked at new developments in the field since 2000. This was the perfect preparation for an update of my book, since it provided me with an almost complete bibliography of scholarship on pre-Islamic Iranian archaeology published over the past 14-15 years.

When I wrote Elam in the late 1990s, it was still impossible for foreign scholars to carry out any kind of fieldwork in Iran, as it had been since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Since 2002, however, many joint projects have been undertaken by Iranian scholars and their foreign counterparts, principally from Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States. In addition, Iranian scholars have published voluminously and many important conferences have been held. All in all, 15 years of scholarship has vastly increased what we know about Elam and it is a challenging but enjoyable task to get stuck into the work of revising my book, most of which I hope to have completed by September. Translated some years ago into Persian, the original edition is widely used in both Iran and the West, but the need for an update is all too apparent to me as I work through all of the new material that has appeared on Elamite civilization since 1999.