Together
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.”