The Hilly Flanks and Beyond

When editors of this volume began organizing a Festschrift in honor of Robert Braidwood, they hoped to interest scholars from a variety of different fields with a theme of the food-producing time range (10,000-4,000 B.C.). Many of the contributors have also incorporated in their discussions an important and controversial subject from Braidwoods large corpus of research, the development of agriculture. The first part of the volume is devoted to articles under the general heading of Syro-Palestine. The theories of spatial analysis are applied in several articles in the Mesopotamian section. Genevieve Dollfus, using Iranian sites of the fifth millennium such as Choga Mish, tries to make comparisons with patterns of land use and settlements from more contemporary periods. This Festschrift is as diverse and interesting as the multifaceted Robert Braidwood. [From a review by Margaret C. Brandt in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies 47 (1988) 294-96]