Excavating the Archives: David Stronach’s fieldwork in Iran with the British Institute of Persian Studies
with Gareth Brereton
David Stronach OBE FSA (1931 – 2020) was a leading figure in the field of Iranian archaeology and founding Director of the British Institute of Persian Studies. He left behind an extensive archive of his early excavations in Iran, currently being digitised in the Pourdavoud Centre at UCLA, prior to cataloguing and research in the UK. This talk will present an overview of the archival material from David’s pioneering excavations at Yarim Tepe, Pasargadae, Nush-i Jan and Shahr-i Qumis. Excavations at Yarim Tepe on the Gorgan plain (1960-62) revealed an archaeological sequence spanning the Late Neolithic through to the Iron Age. Drawing on this archive, a final report on the Yarim Tepe excavations can now be published. The archive also holds over 1,000 images of David’s seminal work at Pasargadae (1961-63), the capital of Cyrus the Great, which will be digitised and made freely available online. Finally, a wealth of archival material exists for David’s excavations at the Median site of Nush-i Jan (1967-77) as well as the Parthian site of Shahr-i Qumis (1967-78), a full appraisal of which will significantly enhance our understanding of these important archaeological sites.
About the speaker:
Gareth Brereton is the British Institute of Persian Studies Stronach Fellow at the University York, where he is researching the David Stronach archive. Prior to this role, Gareth was a curator at the British Museum responsible for the Mesopotamia collections. He was lead curator for the British Museum exhibition ‘I am Ashurbanipal, King of the World, King of Assyria’ and the UK touring exhibition ‘Ancient Iraq: New Discoveries’. He also co-curated an exhibition on Assyrian palace sculpture with the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Previously, Gareth was a curator for the Ur of the Chaldees Project, which aimed to digitally reunify the archaeological material and archival resources from Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavations at the ancient city of Ur. His main research field is the funerary archaeology and material culture of the ancient Near East. He has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Iraq, Oman, Turkey, and Greece, including the British Museum’s recent excavations at Tello in southern Iraq.