They travelled to Iraq in the name of science.
They helped turn archaeology from a system of Western
plunder to a science of cross-discipline knowledge gathering.
They helped make important
scientific discoveries well into their 80s.
They married, had children, and grandchildren.
They died of the same
disease in the same hospital on the same day, 20 hours apart, just long
enough for their former employer to publish
his obituary listing her as surviving him.
They were not apart for long.
2
Archaeologists, Robert Braidwood and His Wife, Linda Braidwood, Die
January 17, 2003
By STUART LAVIETES
Robert
J. Braidwood, a University of
Chicago archaeologist who uncovered evidence of the beginnings of agriculture
and the subsequent rise of civilization
in the Middle East, died on Wednesday in Chicago. He was 95.
From close to the beginning of his career, Dr. Braidwood worked in partnership
with his wife, Linda
S. Braidwood, also an archaeologist. She died several hours later on Wednesday
in the same hospital. She was 93. The couple lived in LaPorte,
Ind.
In decades of work investigating humans'
transition from nomadic
hunting and gathering to farming
and living in villages, the Braidwoods discovered some of the earliest known
buildings and copper
tools as well as the oldest known piece of cloth.
They also helped transform archaeology from a field primarily devoted to providing
museums with recognizable and intact artifacts to a discipline that studies
the processes of change.
They helped develop the modern approach to field work, with its painstaking
recovery of fragmentary and "nonartifactual" remains, and were among
the first to create research teams that included scientists from other disciplines.
Dr. Braidwood began his career in 1933 when he traveled to Syria
as part of a team assembled by James
Henry Breasted, the archaeologist who popularized the term "fertile
crescent" to describe the region of the Tigris
and Euphrates
Rivers where the first cities rose around 3100
B.C.
In 1947, the Braidwoods, who had married 10 years before, turned their attention
to an earlier epoch to test the theory that an agricultural
revolution had preceded the development of civilization. Establishing the
Prehistoric
Project at the Oriental Institute at University
of Chicago, they traveled to northeast
Iraq to look for evidence that they estimated would be 12,000 years old.
In fact, they found artifacts more than 9,000 years old.
To help with this hunt, the Braidwoods built a team that included botanists,
zoologists and
geologists
who could examine bone fragments, plant remains, carbonized grain and other
artifacts that had rarely been studied by archaeologists.
After a year of searching, the team uncovered what they described as the earliest
known village at the time, a settlement
at Jarmo, on the border of Iraq and Iran, that dated to 6800 B.C. They also
discovered evidence of animal
domestication and crop
cultivation.
The Braidwoods' most famous discoveries were made in a project that began in
1963 and lasted until the 1990's. Working with researchers from Istanbul
University, they explored a 400-mile-long swath of southeastern Turkey,
making a remarkable find at Cayonu
in 1964.
They found an even older village, a farming community, dating from 7250 to 6750
B.C.. The village also contained what they described as the earliest known building
— a stone structure with a smoothed flagstone floor that apparently served
a community function.
Six years later, the team uncovered a second building, this one with a terrazzo
floor made using a technique thought to have been invented by the Romans
7,000 years later. In 1984, they found a third structure filled with burned
fragments of human skulls that might have been the product of a mysterious rite.
The researchers also uncovered cold-hammered
copper tools, including small pins and hooks.
In 1993 at Cayonu, the team discovered a semi-fossilized fragment of cloth that
was woven about 7000 B.C. The find, not only pushed back the known date of the
introduction of textiles, but also provided evidence that flax had been domesticated
by that time. Flax seeds
found at the site were much larger than those of the wild plant, adding more
support to the theory.
For the Braidwoods, these discoveries confirmed the link between agriculture
and civilization and pointed to the vitality of the relationship between
the two.
"Once people began controlling their food
supply through agriculture," Dr. Braidwood wrote, "social change
accelerated at a rate much faster than archaeologists had previously envisioned."
Robert John Braidwood was born in Detroit
on July 29, 1907, and received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the
University of Michigan and his Ph.D. in archaeology from the department of oriental
languages at the University of Chicago.
Most recently, he was a professor emeritus
at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.
Linda Schreiber Braidwood was born
on Oct. 9, 1909, in Grand Rapids, Mich., and received a bachelor's from the
University of Michigan and a master's in archaeology from the University of
Chicago.
They are survived by a daughter, Gretel Braidwood, of Chicago; a son, Douglas,
of Virginia Beach; and three grandchildren.
Among Dr. Braidwood's books was "Prehistoric Men," published in 1948
with a number of later editions. Mrs. Braidwood wrote "Digging
Beyond the Tigris," published in 1953. They collaborated on several
books, including "Excavations in the Plain of Antioch" (1960).
Dr. Braidwood, a dynamic figure who some say was an inspiration for the famous
screen archaeologist Indiana Jones,
brought a literary sensibility to his exacting work.
As he set out on his expedition to Turkey in 1963, he said in a statement: "Somewhere
in one of perhaps a dozen places in the Middle East about 12,000 years ago,
some man made a remarkable observation: he observed that a common weed which
he had doubtless collected for eating was growing where he had previously spilled
seeds.
"Once man was able to remain in one spot, he was able to start thinking
about matters other than gathering food. He was able to begin thinking about
his new relationship to other men, new relationships to his immediate surroundings
and to those forces in nature which played such a large part in his existence."
Copyright
2003 New York Times (Registration required)
10:34:39 PM 
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