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Selected case studies and useful reading questions: what was found, how was it studied and what follows from the evidence?
The articles and guides here connect case studies with methods: layers and dating, critical reading, pottery, coins, inscriptions and raw materials. Choose a question, then follow the sources and related reading. Checking an abstract is never presented as reviewing an entire paper.
UNESCO writes that Susa developed as an important centre as early as the late fifth millennium BCE, and the Met's timeline describes its beginning around a large mud-brick platform. What the two sources record, and what they leave open.
The publication page of an excavation report issued in 2006 describes Tall-e Bakun A, near Persepolis, as one of the precursors of the complex societies of the fourth millennium BCE. The page gives the site no date of its own, and this article does not invent one.
3 min read, approximately
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