The modern era of interdisciplinary research in archaeology was pioneered at the beginning of the twentieth century by a 70-year-old geologist, Raphael Pumpelly, who assembled a diverse field staff for his 1904 excavations at ancient sites in the Central Asian oases of Anau, Merv, and Samarkand. The group included four archaeologists, two geologists/geomor-phologists (Pumpelly and his son), and a cultural geographer. The materials recovered were analyzed and published by a zoologist, a chemist (who investigated the metal artifacts), two human palaeontologists/ physical anthropologists, and a botanist, as well as three of the four archaeologists from the field staff.
Pumpelly’s demonstration of successful, explicitly interdisciplinary archaeological field research and publication did not immediately inspire further examples. In the years following World War II, however, interdisciplinary, ecologically oriented archaeology developed rapidly in both Europe and North America. In England, Grahame Clarke’s research at the Mesolithic site of Star Carr, and his major synthesis, Prehistoric Europe: The Economic Basis, were foundational. Roughly contemporaneously with Clarke’s work, Robert J. Braidwood’s Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, projects fielded a series of interdisciplinary teams in search of the earliest empirical evidence for agriculture and pastoralism in southwest Asia, beginning with excavations at the early village site of Jarmo (c. 8500 years old) in north Iraq. To recover and interpret the remains of the earliest domesticated plants and animals, Braidwood enlisted botanical and zoological experts, as well as geologists specializing in palaeoenvironmental research. Like Pumpelly, Braid-wood obtained funding to take several of these experts in the natural sciences to the field with him, and to support their subsequent analyses of floral, faunal, and geological materials. Moreover, he succeeded in assembling a panel of such experts who collaborated with him for several decades as the research ramified to other sites and other geographic locales in western Asia.
World History
