1On January 15, 2020 Olivier Nieuwenhuijse passed away at the young age of 53 due to an incurable illness. He leaves behind his wife Renske Dooijes and his two young daughters, Lotte and Lili. His death is not only an immeasurable personal tragedy but also a great loss to the archaeological community.

2Olivier became involved in archaeology after completing a B.A. in social psychology. He wrote his M.A. thesis at the University of Amsterdam on the Early Bronze Age pottery from Tell Raqa’i in Eastern Syria. He subsequently pursued a PhD at Leiden University on pottery from Sabi Abyad. Thereafter, he held various postdoctoral fellowships, museum posts and a position as lecturer at Leiden University. During his last years, he had a prestigious Alexander von Humboldt fellowship at the Freie Universität in Berlin.

4His keen interest in the material properties of pottery led Olivier to study modes of vessel repair. He published several articles on this topic with Renske Dooijes. In an interesting interpretive turn, they argue that vessel repair did not result in containers of inferior quality; rather, repair itself increased the value of such objects because of the craftsmanship required, thereby lending these containers a special prestige. Considerations of materiality also occupied Olivier in other ways. He pursued research on bitumen-painted pottery, and he compared the mutual advantages and chronological occurrences of early ceramics and containers made of other materials such as white ware, basketry or stone.

5If Sabi Abyad remained at the core of Olivier’s interests, he never allowed himself to become mired in a purely local perspective. Rather, he endeavored to understand the link between small-scale manifestations of material culture and their regional or supraregional spread. One of his fundamental findings was that the earliest ceramics in Mesopotamia did not consist of technologically simple, coarse and clumsily made vessels. Rather, he was able to identify an early horizon of ceramics, the manufacture of which must have involved an intensive preoccupation with interactions among different materials. These generally small containers were almost always mineral tempered and decorated in highly variable ways. Comparing the early occupation levels from Sabi Abyad and Shir, whose director, Karin Bartl, had invited him to join the team, he showed that these products curiously do not display signs of an initial tentative experimentation. Such containers, Olivier argued, belong to an “Initial Pottery Neolithic” horizon and due their rarity should be understood as a kind of “small find”. The phase in which they occur starts around 7000 BCE and can be identified at many places in northern Mesopotamia. No geographical origin has yet been identified, but Olivier maintained that the search for such a site would likely be futile due to the small quantities of these vessels.

6Olivier also made important conceptual contributions to the study of later periods of the Neolithic. He referred to the spread of Halaf ceramics from about 6000 BCE as an early “globalization” by comparing the geographically large region of this painting style to the much smaller-scale predecessor pottery making traditions. Consulting excavation publications is not sufficient to arrive at such a synthesis: Olivier was a driving force behind meetings of a small group of devoted researchers working on these early ceramic traditions. Conferences took place in Tsukuba (Japan), in Rejviz (Czech Republic), Empúries (Spain) and Leiden. It remains to be seen whether they will continue without Olivier. In any case, the introductions and syntheses of these meetings, almost always co-authored by him, are especially worth reading, peppered as they are with his dry sense of humor as well as his keen insights.

7After 2011 and the end of every possibility for field research in Syria, Olivier first joined Dr. Simone Mühl’s team from Munich to study the prehistoric pottery from her survey in the Shahrizor plain of Iraqi Kurdistan. Later, he started an excavation project in the region at the site of Tell Begum, a large mound with Neolithic and Chalcolithic occupations. Olivier was able to clean the trenches from Muhammad Ali Mustafa’s 1960 excavation and expand them. This work, to which he was very much attached, remains unfinished.

8Olivier also became engaged in safeguarding Syrian antiquities in the turmoil of the civil war. When ISIS made Raqqa its quasi-capital, the regional museum was looted. A complex of particularly valuable archaeological finds that had been stored in a vault of the National Bank in Raqqa was also stolen. With “Focus Raqqa”, Olivier and several Syrian colleagues collected information in order to construct a detailed database that would make every single lost museum item identifiable should it appear on the art market.

9In the summer of 2017, Olivier came to Berlin with an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship. He had envisaged a project that was to be a major synthesis of his work on northern Mesopotamian container cultures of the late Neolithic. The provisional title of this book was Containers of Change. Since the early spring of 2019, Olivier knew that he might not have long to live. Courageously, he confronted this situation by continuing to work intensively on his projects, publishing, but also transferring some tasks to colleagues. Until shortly before his death, he was actively involved in planning a workshop in Berlin, which we were unfortunately only able to bring to fruition after his death. A publication entitled The Development of Container Cultures in Southwest Asia is in preparation.

10Olivier’s life can be summed up under the term “care”. He was careful as an archaeologist, someone who reflected thoroughly on what he communicated to a larger academic world. He could read far more in the details of material culture than most of his colleagues. More importantly, Olivier was caring as a person. His colleagues and friends, his students and co-workers will remember him as an ever friendly, patient and supportive person. He was deeply concerned with the fate of his Syrian friends following the outbreak of the civil war. We mourn the loss of a colleague whose insights, paired with a superb sense of humor, are exemplary in their combination of serious scholarship with the sunny sides of life.

Olivier Nieuwenhuijse in Sabi Abyad, 2006 (Renske Dooijes).

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