Preface to the second edition

Summary

More than fifteen years have passed since the original publication of The Archaeology of Elam in 1999. Much of relevance to Elamite studies has occurred in the intervening years. In addition to the hundreds of new publications that have appeared (for compilations of bibliography see Haerinck and Stevens 2005; De Schacht and Haerinck 2013; Jahangirfar 2015; Mofidi-Nasrabadi 2015), many older works have been consulted here that were not incorporated into the original edition, amounting to an augmentation of the references list by more than 800 titles. Moreover, several important conferences on Elam and Iranian archaeology have taken place. But perhaps most importantly, fieldwork in Iran has been conducted by both Iranian teams and joint expeditions involving Iranian and American, Australian, British, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish and other scholars (see e.g. Azarnoush and Helwing 2005). These have investigated a wide range of topics touching on nearly all aspects of Elam's history and archaeology.

As a result of these developments, Asya Graf, Archaeology and Renaissance Studies editor at Cambridge University Press, and I decided, in the autumn of 2013, that a second, revised edition of The Archaeology of Elam was warranted. My thanks go to Cambridge University Press, and Asya Graf in particular, for facilitating this revision. While I have no wish to alter the dedication of this book to my family, I would like to acknowledge the large number of colleagues, particularly in Iran, who have shared their knowledge of Elam with me over the years, and furthered the study of this subject. Iranian history and archaeology are nothing if not diverse. I would not wish to suggest that Elam is more worthy of study than many other aspects of Iranian antiquity. Yet having embarked in earnest on the trail of the ancient Elamites many years ago, I am happy to travel down that path yet again, this time with considerably more data at hand than was previously the case.