Unforeseeable Futures: Confronting Crises in the Archaeology of Highland Societies

Author Biography

Susan Pollock held positions as professor of Western Asian Archaeology at the Freie Universität Berlin and professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University. She has long-standing research interests in village, early state, and urban societies in Western Asia and has conducted fieldwork in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Turkmenistan. She also researches more recent periods and has worked on sites of the 20th century in and around Berlin. Her research draws on feminist and political economic approaches to the study of the past, with specific attention to processes of subjectivation and the place of commensality in social life. She is the author of Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden that Never Was (1999), editor of Between Feasts and Daily Meals. Toward an Archaeology of Commensal Spaces (2012), and co-editor (with Reinhard Bernbeck and Kamyar Abdi, 2010) of The 2003 Excavations at Tol-e Baši, Iran: Social Life in a Neolithic Village and Looking Closely. Excavations at Monjukli Depe, Turkmenistan, 2010 – 2014, Volume I (with Reinhard Bernbeck and Birgül Ögüt, 2019). Reinhard Bernbeck is Professor i.R. of Western Asian archaeology at the Freie Universität Berlin and professor emeritus of Anthropology at Binghamton University. His interests include the prehistory of Iran, archaeological manifestations of repression, exploitation and suffering, and ideological dimensions of archaeological practice. He has carried out fieldwork in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Turkmenistan. He has also investigated several prisoner-of-war and forced labor camps from the 20th century in Germany. He is the author of Materielle Spuren des nationalsozialistischen Terrors (2017), co-editor (with Randall H. McGuire) of Ideologies in Archaeology (2011), Subjects and Narratives in Archaeology (with Ruth van Dyke, 2015), Between Memory Sites and Memory Networks (with Kerstin Hofmann and Ulrike Sommer, 2017), and Containers of Change (with Olivier Nieuwenhuyse and Koen Berghuijs, 2023). Gisela Eberhardt is a project manager for the joint research project “The Iranian Highlands. Resiliences and Integration in Premodern Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin and an editor in the editorial department at the German Archaeological Institute’s (DAI) head office. She holds a PhD in archaeology from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and was one of the managing editors of Edition Topoi. She is the author of the book Deutsche Ausgrabung im ‘langen’ 19. Jahrhundert. Eine problemorientierte Untersuchung zur archäologischen Praxis (2011) and of the forthcoming chapter “From Deep Holes to the Bigger Picture. A History of Methods in Archaeological Excavation” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Archaeology as well as co-editor (with Fabian Link) of Historiographical Approaches to Past Archaeological Research (2015). Martin Kehl is Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Koblenz and studies the significance of climate and humans for landscape evolution as well as the effects of environmental changes on pre-modern societies. He investigates sedimentary archives of past environmental change and human adaptation including soils, loess, lake sediments and anthropogenic deposits. His research focuses on the Late Quaternary and Iran. He is the author of Quaternary loesses, loess-like sediments, soils and climate change in Iran (2010) and co-editor of Loess records of environmental change (2020), Inside-outside. Integrating cave and open-air archives (2018) and Loess, soils and climate change in Iran and vicinity (2017). Results of his research on the Quaternary of Iran are also published in a large number of co-authored peer-reviewed papers.