American archaeology today encompasses a huge range of approaches and draws eclectically on a multitude of academic disciplines. Until now, however, there has been no book seeking to separate the main strands and traditions of research and present a rounded picture of American archaeological thought in all its diversity. The seventeen essays in Archaeological Thought in America describe recent theoretical advances and present substantive interpretations of prehistoric data drawn from a variety of cultures and time-frames, including Mesoamerica, Central Asia, India and China. The contributors include many of the leading North American archaeologists of this generation.

The site of Tepe Yahya in southeastern Iran is famous, among other important aspects, for the Proto-Elamite complex dated to around 3000 BC (Period IVC). The material culture of Period IVC is not exclusively limited to its Proto-Elamite component, but is also characterized by the presence of elements from other Middle-Asian cultural ceramic traditions. In addition to a synthesis of the Proto-Elamite period and the material assemblage at Tepe Yahya, The Proto-Elamite Settlement and Its Neighbors provides an updated review and comprehensive discussion of the Proto-Elamite sphere, its relations to Mesopotamia, and its eastern Middle Asian neighbors. This innovative book illustrates that the "multi-cultural" situation at Tepe Yahya Period IVC was present across many sites in Middle Asia and that, in addition to the Proto-Elamite sphere and the cities of Mesopotamia, Middle Asia around 3000 BC was incorporated within an interactive "multi-players" network of polities. Benjamin Mutin, Author, is a Research Fellow for the American School of Prehistoric Research, Harvard University. He is an archaeologist who specializes in Middle Asian proto-history and who has worked in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Tajikistan, and Oman. He holds a Ph.D. in Prehistory, Anthropology, and Ethnology from University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne. C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, General Editor, and Project Director for Tepe Yahya, is the Stephen Phillips Professor of Archaeology, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, Peabody Museum (Director 1977-1990).

The Murghad River delta, the site of ancient Margiana, was extensively settled during at least part of the Bronze Age, between 2200 and 1750 B.C. Oases in an otherwise desert region, settlements were situated along deltaic branches of the river or canals dug from those branches. Excavations at one of the largest and most complex of these sites, Gonur depe, have been ongoing for many years under the direction of Victor Sarianidi. During the 1988-89 field season, Fred Hiebert excavated part of Gonur in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture of Turkmenistan and the Institute of Archaeology in Moscow.

Published here, the results provide a key to understanding the large corpus of material of the Bactro-Margiana Archaeological Complex extracted over the past 30 years from this and neighboring sites of the Oxus civilization.

Tepe Yahya provides a stratigraphic sequence that stretches some 6,000 years, from the Neolithic period to the early centuries AD. As a result, the site is critical for understanding cultural processes in southeastern Iran. In this fifth volume of results of the excavations at Tepe Yahya, Peter Magee presents evidence from the Iron Age occupation of the site. Looking beyond the epigraphic and historical data and examining the insights provided by the artifactual record, Magee describes how a small settlement, located some distance from the main centers of power, came into being and was affected by the emergence of the Achaemenid imperial system, which stretched from Pakistan to Libya.

Situated roughly midway between the great cities of the Indus Valley and those of the Mesopotamian plains, Tepe Yahya occupies a special place in our conceptions of relations between these distant territories during the early Bronze Age. Its third-millennium levels, dating from 3000 to 2100 B.C., are particularly important.

In this definitive study, D.T. Potts describes the stratigraphy, architecture, ceramics, and chronology of the site and presents a full inventory of the small finds. Holly Pittman contributes comprehensive illustrations and a discussion of the seals and sealings, and Philip Kohl provides an analysis of the carved chlorite industry. In a foreword and afterword, project director C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky tells the story of the archaeological expedition and reflects on the contributions of the Tepe Yahya project.

This comprehensive study of the Proto-Elamite language (ca. 3000 B.C.) is based on a small archive recovered from the site of Tepe Yahya in southeastern Iran. The authors, two of the leading specialists on the most ancient written texts of the Near East, illuminate the structure of the texts, the numerical sign systems used, and the relation of Proto-Elamite to other protocuneiform writing systems. A computer-generated sign list compares the written archive from Tepe Yahya with those of other archaeological sites from which Proto-Elamite texts have been recovered.

The volume offers a new understanding of the language and culture of the Proto-Elamites as well as important insights into the economic structure of the earliest literate civilizations. With a new preface by the authors.

title>Excavations at Tepe Yahya" describes the geographical and paleoenvironmental setting of Tepe Yahya and details the earliest architecture at the site, the production of ceramics and metallurgy, and the excavation's small finds. Interpretive essays examine settlement patterns, change and development over time, and the community's setting in the wider context of core-periphery interaction in the fifth and fourth millennia B.C.