Archaeology, Artifacts and Antiquities of the Ancient Near East.

• Author: Roller, Lynn
• Position: Book review

Archaeology, Artifacts and Antiquities of the Ancient Near East. By OSCAR WHITE MUSCARELLA. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 62. Leiden: BRILL, 2013. Pp. vi + 1088. S292.

Oscar Muscarella has had a long and distinguished career as an excavator, museum curator, scholar, and public conscience directed at those who collect, display, and study antiquities from the ancient Near East. He has excavated in Turkey and Iran and published extensively on archaeological sites and artifacts from those countries. Currently a senior research fellow emeritus of ancient Near Eastern art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he is well known for his almost encyclopedic knowledge of the art and archaeology of the ancient Near East and also for his direct and unrelenting criticism of those who buy and sell ancient artifacts from this region without regard for authenticity or legitimate context. Muscarella has published widely on all of these topics. The volume under review came into being through an invitation to Muscarella from Brill to select a representative sampling of his papers for publication. Even at over a thousand pages, the volume presents only a portion of Muscarellas voluminous output, but it touches on many key aspects of his career. The papers are divided into two sections. Part one, entitled "Sites and Excavations," focuses primarily on material from excavations in which Muscarella took part. Part two, "Artifacts, Cultures, Forgeries, and Provenience," includes papers on different classes of artifacts, on collecting practices, and on the illegal antiquities trade.

The first section gathers twenty papers drawn from Muscarella's career as a field archaeologist in Iran and Turkey. The major emphasis here, fifteen papers, is on his work in northwestern Iran. Muscarella was closely involved with the excavations at Hasanlu, a project sponsored jointly by the University of Pennsylvania, from which Muscarella received his Ph.D. in 1965, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He also directed or co-directed other excavations in the vicinity of Hasanlu, and several of the papers are fairly straightforward field reports, describing the excavation methods and results of projects at Se Girdan, Agrab Tepe, Dinkha Tepe, and others.

The papers on Hasanlu are more subjective in their approach. One is a critique of another paper on a set of lion-headed pins found at Hasanlu; this offers an alternative reading of the material, but since the original...