After a decade-long hiatus in the years of World War II, archaeological fieldwork was resumed in Iran in 1948. In that year, the Oriental Institute returned to its long tradition of archaeological research by sending Donald McCown to the lowlands of southwestern Iran to conduct a series of surface surveys to find a multi-period site for excavation. For his survey, McCown chose the Ram Hormuz region, southeast of lowland Susiana and the region south and east of the provincial town of Ahvaz down to the Persian Gulf. McCown recorded 118 sites in the Ram Hormuz and Ahvaz areas and eventually chose for excavation the large prehistoric mound complex Tall-e Geser. Three months of excavation in 1948 and 1949 yielded materials that were kept in Chicago for many years. Apart from short articles, the site was never fully published. In Part 1 of this two-part volume, Abbas Alizadeh and colleagues have undertaken a final publication of the site. This task was undertaken because of a number of important considerations. First, the excavations at Geser have been cited as justifying the division of the Uruk period in southwestern Iran into Early, Middle, and Late phases. Second, Geser remains the only systematically excavated site in the Ram Hormuz region - a strategic location between the Susiana and Mesopotamian alluvium and the Zagros highlands of southwestern Iran. Third, Geser has produced a very extensive body of archaeological materials dating to the comparatively less understood proto-Elamite period, roughly the first few centuries of the third millennium bc. And finally, with the exception of a 700-800-year gap following the proto-Elamite phase, Geser remains one of the only sites in the Near East to have a very long and generally uninterrupted depositional sequence, in this case spanning from the fifth millennium BC to the Safavid period. The site's crucial location, its importance in the archaeological literature, and its long stratigraphic sequence made it imperative that the original excavation results from Geser be published in anticipation of a time when the site can be re-excavated. Part 2 of this volume presents the results of regional surveys conducted in the Ram Hormuz plain from 2005 to 2008, which were undertaken by Alizadeh and colleagues with the goal of understanding the semi-nomadic, mobile component of lowland Susiana and its hinterlands through time.

This volume presents the results of three seasons of excavations at Chogha Bonut, Lowland Susiana, in the modern-day province of Khuzestan, southwestern Iran. Susiana was a major contributor to the cultural development of the ancient Near East, and thanks to more than a century of archaeological investigation, it is also the best known region in the entire area. Excavations at numerous sites, but primarily at Susa and Chogha Mish in Susiana, have provided a long sequence of archaeological phases that span some 8,000 years, from early prehistoric times to the early Islamic period. The initial phases of the colonization of Susiana by early farmers, however, remained unknown until a series of excavations at Chogha Bonut pushed the earliest period of occupation of Susiana to the aceramic phase, ca. 7200 BC. The results of these excavations add to the already rich picture of cultural development in the region, the initial chapter of human adaptation in the early phases of village life in the Near East.

The present publication is the final report on the eleven seasons of excavations at Chogha Mish. In addition to the materials and records from Chogha Mish, Alizadeh uses the data available from the excavations of the neighboring sites of Chogha Bonut and Boneh Fazl Ali to augment his reconstruction of Susiana prehistoric development. Together, these three sites cover a long period from ca. 7200 to 500 B.C.While most researchers see the fourth millennium as a pivotal period in the development of state organizations in southwestern Iran as a result of intra-regional competition between various local polities, Alizadeh traces the onset of the conflict of interest between the settled agricultural communities of the lowlands and mobile pastoralists of the highlands to the fifth millennium b.c. In doing so, Alizadeh considers a much more substantial role for the ancient mobile pastoralists of the region, placing Chogha Mish in a much wider regional context and arguing that at the beginning of the fifth millennium b.c, as the local elite were rapidly developing, lowland Susiana shifted its orientation from Mesopotamia to highland Iran, where most of the material resources are located. He attributes this shift to the development of mobile pastoralism in highland Iran and considers the ancient mobile pastoralists as the agents of contact between the highlands and the lowlands. Database of faunal remains available online.

The late prehistoric Bakun A culture in Fars is a major source of information on the initial development of the evolutionary path which vertical mobile pastoralists of highland Iran may have taken to develop state organisations. Long before the appearance of administrative technology and physical segregation of administration, production, storage, and residential units in urban centers of the second half of the fourth millennium BC, Tall-e Bakun A, near Persepolis in the Marv Dasht region of Fars, stands as one of the precursors to the complex societies of the fourth millennium BC early urban centres. The present publication presents the final report of the last season's excavations at Tall-e Bakun A. The archaeological materials from this season are combined with the results of other pertinent data from surveys and excavations in the Near East to provide a foundation upon which pre-state social evolution in late prehistoric highland Fars has been reconstructed and interpreted. Based on the analysis of the available archaeological data as well as historical and ethnographic sources, Alizadeh argues that the specialised manufacture and administrative aspects at Tall-e Bakun A indicate the existence of differential status at the site, where a few families or ranking individuals controlled the manufacture and flow of goods.