ABBAS ALIZADEH PROFILE:
Chicago Scholar Is Keystone in Bridging Two Worlds

A quarter-century of suspicion separates Iranians and Americans, and that gulf is a major hurdle in reconnecting researchers in the two countries. Now those who were born in Iran but work at U.S. universities are providing the grease necessary for the wheels of cooperation to start turning, paving the way for a new generation of scholars from both nations to work together.

No one has worked harder at this than Alizadeh, a wiry 52-year-old who is graying at the temples but remains as energetic as a college student. Outspoken and determined, he initially studied psychology at the University of Tehran, the country's premier institution, during the early 1970s. But most of his fellow players on the soccer team were in the archaeology department, so he switched majors. "I didn't have much feeling for it," he said during a recent visit to the ancient capital of Persepolis. "It just seemed romantic."

But when he encountered a professor from Chicago at a dig site on the central Iranian plateau, he made a beeline for the United States. Three years later, the shah's regime collapsed, the universities closed, and archaeology in Iran seemed all but dead. After getting his Ph.D. at Chicago in 1987, Alizadeh went to Harvard to teach about ancient nomadism rather than go back to Iran, then he returned to Chicago as a research associate. "Culturally, I'm a Midwesterner," he says. When he finally went to Iran for a family visit in the early 1990s, he found that most of the best researchers had left the country or retired, and he chafed at being treated as a foreigner in his own native land. But shortly after, he heard that the head of archaeology in the southern province of Fars was open-minded about foreign cooperation. Armed with a small grant from Chicago, he won permission to travel for a month with a nomadic tribe in that area, gathering ethnoarchaeological data. "After that, I realized it was possible to do something in Iran, so I kept coming back."

CREDIT: A. LAWLER

After innumerable delays, frustrations, and cups of tea in Tehran offices, he finally received permission in 1996 to excavate a site in Khuzistan in the country's southwest, but without the help of any American colleagues. In 2001, after much coaxing, he won approval to dig and survey in Elam, the region north of Khuzistan on the Iraqi border in which the earliest literate civilization in that area developed, and this time he could bring a team from the United States. "It was really terra incognita," he says, following the revolution and disastrous Iran-Iraq war.

With money from Chicago and a U.S. National Science Foundation grant, the team members set off. But they soon discovered that a survey was impossible. "When the Iraqis left, they planted mines all over the place," Alizadeh recalls. "Work was impossible and extremely risky." Instead, he and his team relocated to Khuzistan, where they stumbled on rare evidence of an ancient nomadic encampment. He and his colleagues now are working on a 5-year excavation and survey project in the region.

At the same time, Alizadeh took up the challenge of organizing the Bastan Museum's important pottery collection at the request of the senior staff. Giant bags of shards were stored in a damp cellar, and museum staff were on the verge of throwing away the unorganized material. But Alizadeh intervened, and today the museum boasts an impressive collection of nearly a million shards, cataloged according to region and type, in a basement newly renovated with government money. "So many of these sites no longer exist," says University of Chicago anthropologist Nicholas Kouchoukos, who helped with the work. "This was an irreplaceable collection which we assumed was all lost."

In the course of the reorganization, Alizadeh was able to train Iranian students in the important art of shard recognition. Given Iran's long period of isolation, such training is critical. And newer methods are slowly gaining attention. "Before I came to Iran, nobody collected bones or seeds at all. They had not heard about ethnobotany," he says. "They just collected objects and pottery. Now at least they feel it is very shameful not to collect these things."

After his years of devotion to Iranian archaeology, officials here clearly trust Alizadeh, although he says some still suspect him of being a double agent. "The fact that I'm Iranian and American has helped immensely, and they use me for that purpose." During the recent Tehran conference, Alizadeh was all movement, introducing foreign archaeologists to Iranian colleagues and escorting a delegation of Chicago academics to a series of appointments with senior Iranian officials. "If things continue this way, I think foreigners can come and apply independently; you won't have to have an Iranian name."

Kouchoukos gives him credit for smoothing the way for others. "Come hell or high water, he's been here," he says. "He's made a difference through his sheer force of presence and will." Alizadeh's next project will be to help Iranian archaeologists conduct a comprehensive survey of the Persepolis region, one of the richest archaeological areas in all of Iran. But he remains a realist about the future of this politically volatile region. "Tomorrow, everything could be ruined. I work as if there is no tomorrow; I plan as if I can be here for another 100 years."

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Volume 302, Number 5647, Issue of 7 Nov 2003, pp. 978-979.
Copyright © 2003 by The American Association for the Advancement of Science. All rights reserved.