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Robert Braidwood's career was devoted to investigation of one of the most significant transitions in the human past: from hunting-gathering-foraging of wild plants and animals to agriculture and pastoralism. Beginning with the work he conceived and directed at the prehistoric village site of Jarmo in northern Iraq, he spent half a century carrying out interdisciplinary research on that problem in Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. His 1950s Iraq-Jarmo Project, and the publications based on it, were so well known that for several decades during the mid-20th century, anthropology students were required to display knowledge about Jarmo and "the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent." That phrase was Braidwood's description of the mountain foothill locales where he believed the world's first village farming communities were established-places like Jarmo, where wild wheat, barley, and legumes grew and wild goats, sheep, pigs, and cattle roamed. Such sedentary communities, he thought, laid the economic foundations for development of Bronze Age civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates floodplain.
Robert John Braidwood was born in 1907 in Detroit, Michigan. His father was a pharmacist; his father's brother was a medical doctor in central Michigan who collected American Indian artifacts. In a short autobiographical account published in 1981, Braidwood refers to this collection of his uncle's and to a science course he took in high school as his earliest awareness of archaeology as a field of study. His own initial ambitions, however, were directed elsewhere, specifically toward architecture, in which he obtained certification at the University of Michigan in 1929. But owing to economic effects of the Great Depression, he was never employed as a professional architect. Instead, he returned to the University of Michigan to pursue advanced study in anthropology. In the spring of 1930 he enrolled in an ancient history class. The instructor, Leroy Waterman, when not on campus, was directing the Michigan excavations at a large site near Baghdad, Iraq (Selucia-on-the-Tigris, whose modern name is Tell Umar). Braidwood used his recently acquired skills as an architectural draftsman to create such a fine product for one of the class assignments ("draw up a chronological chart for the ancient Near East") that Waterman invited him to Tell Umar as expedition draftsman for the 1930-31 field season. Braidwood accepted. After that initial experience in Iraq,...