1Professor Robert H. Dyson Jr., passed away on February 14, 2020, at the age of 92. A world renowned Near Eastern archaeologist who changed our understanding of ancient Iran, Dyson leaves behind a distinguished legacy as an educator and mentor to generations of scholars who studied with him at the University of Pennsylvania, and in the field in the Ushnu-Solduz valley of north-western Iran. He brought both scientific rigour and anthropological insight to his scholarship as well as to the various administrative positions he held during his illustrious career.

2Dyson was born in 1927 and first raised in New York and then in Toronto. During World War II he enlisted in the US Navy, serving in China. At the war’s end, he enrolled at Harvard University where he studied archaeology under first Carlton Coon and then Lauriston Ward, who would become his mentor. Graduating with a BA in 1950, Dyson chose to stay at Harvard for graduate school, where he came to know two other Ward students: Louis Dupree and Walter Fairservis. Professor Ward felt that too much archaeology was focused on the western part of the ancient Near East, and sent his three graduate students to study ancient Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan (respectively). After participating in the Point of Pines archaeological field school in Arizona, representing the Peabody Museum as an anthropologist on the first Marshall expedition to study the Kalahari Bushmen of southern Africa, and studying under Kathleen Kenyon at Jericho, Dyson was sent in 1953 to the southwestern Iranian site of Susa for his PhD research. At Susa, he worked under the incomparable Roman Ghirshman to conduct the first modern stratigraphic assessment of the Acropole mound (Dyson 1966). Dyson’s dissertation on the Susa stratigraphy inspired his seminal early summaries of the prehistory of Iran (Dyson 1965, 1968a, 1968b), which for the first time combined stratigraphic assessment, radiocarbon dates, and material comparanda.

3Dyson arrived at the University of Pennsylvania in 1954 as an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and assistant curator in the Near East Section of the University Museum (now called the “Penn Museum”), where he was responsible for the installation of the Mesopotamia gallery in 1954–1955. He was tenured in 1962 and promoted to professor of Anthropology in 1967, when he also became head curator of the Museum’s Near East Section. It was in his early years at Penn (1956-1957) that Dyson began excavations at the site of Hasanlu in northwest Iran. His initial goal was to construct a stratigraphic sequence for the region, and although he continued to initiate and support research furthering this goal at sites such as Hajji Firuz, Dalma, Pisdeli and Dinkha Tepes, the discovery of multiple burned buildings containing in situ remains and artefacts at Hasanlu soon made it the focus of his research. An Iron Age destruction event at that site formed the basis of one of the most important research excavations and field training projects in the ancient Near East for two decades. At Hasanlu, he discovered a stunning array of artefacts from primary contexts, but it was the architectural context of these finds that most interested him (Dyson 1977, 1980, 1989; Dyson and Muscarella 1989; Dyson and Voigt 2003). While the study and publication of this site continue to this day, the careful excavation and recording system developed by Dyson has already allowed for numerous monographs, articles, and dissertations about the site to be published (including the Hasanlu Excavation Reports series and the Hasanlu Special Studies series published by the Penn Museum Press, as well as the mini-monograph published as a special edition of the journal Expedition in 1989, vol. 31,2-3).

5In 1979, Dyson was appointed dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He served in this capacity until 1982 when he was named the Williams director of the Penn Museum, holding this position until his retirement in 1994. Under his leadership, the Penn Museum experienced a renaissance of research, teaching, and scholarship. While somewhat limited in time by his administrative duties, Dyson still managed to produce some important scholarly works during the 1980s. For example, in the mid-1970s Dyson had co-directed with Maurizio Tosi a short field season to restudy the prehistoric site of Tepe Hissar (Tappah Hesar), first excavated by the Penn Museum under Erich Schmidt in the 1930s (see Dyson and Howard 1989). A particularly significant result of this season was Dyson’s reinterpretation of the late 4^th and early 3^rd millennium BCE at Hissar in relation to the Proto-Elamite phenomenon of the Iranian plateau (see Dyson 1987). His revision of the cultural sequence of the Iranian plateau, stretching from Susa to Hissar, continues to influence scholarship in the region today (e.g., Helwing 2004; Thornton et al. 2013). This work was also incorporated into Voigt and Dyson’s monumental summary of the prehistoric sequence of Iran published in the Chronologies in Old World archaeology series (Voigt and Dyson 1992), which is still the most comprehensive review of the absolute and relative chronologies of prehistoric Iranian sites in existence.

6After his formal retirement from the museum and the university in 1994, Dyson remained active with the Hasanlu Publication Project for many years, organising and annotating the enormous physical archive of field notes, plan drawings, and artefact cards. Continuing his interest in the Iron Age sequence he analysed the period III ceramics from Hasanlu (Dyson 1999a, 1999b) and contributed to an analysis of the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze sequence in Solduz (Danti et al. 2004). He also oversaw the publication of a number of monographs (e.g., Danti 2004, De Schauensee 2011). At the same time, Dyson continued his interest in the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age of northeastern Iran (e.g., Hiebert and Dyson 2002; Dyson and Thornton 2009), including a research trip with Thornton in 2004 to see the Yarim Tepe collection at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge and the Shah Tepe collection at the Medelhavsmuseet in Stockholm.

7Throughout his lifetime, Dyson was an active member of numerous scholarly organisations, often serving in leadership positions. He was president of the Archaeological Institute of America from 1979-1981 and founding president of the American Institute of Iranian Studies from 1967-1969 (and again in 1987-1990). He was a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received honours from the Athenaeum of Philadelphia and the Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, and was a decorated chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France). He was awarded the Order Houmauyoun (4^th rank) by the Shah of Iran in 1977. Dyson was unquestionably a “giant” in the history of ancient Near Eastern studies who will be remembered for modernising the archaeological study of prehistoric Iran and for training multiple generations of students who went on to form academic dynasties of their own. His research and scholarly publications established a cultural baseline for prehistoric Iranian studies that allowed this complex archaeological landscape to be better integrated with interregional studies across the Near East, Central Asia, and South Asia. Dyson spent his later years enjoying life on a farm in upstate New York, in a townhouse on Capitol Hill in DC, and finally in a charming retirement home in Williamsburg, VA. As always, he was surrounded by his chosen family—people, dogs, cats, geese, chickens, sheep, llamas and the occasional peacock. In his cheerful and quiet way, he continued to dole out wisdom and guidance until the last month of his life.