Daniel T. Potts

D.T. Potts is Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology and History at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW), New York University. From 1991 to 2012 he was the Edwin Cuthbert Hall Professor of Middle Eastern Archaeology at the University of Sydney. Educated at Harvard, he previously taught at the Free University of Berlin (1981-1986) and the Univ. of Copenhagen (1980-1981, 1986-1991). He is a specialist in the archaeology and early history of Iran, Mesopotamia and the Arabian peninsula. He is the founding editor of the journal Arabian Archaeology & Epigraphy; a Corrsponding Fellow of the British Academy; a Corresponding Member of ISMEO; and a Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute. He has excavated at sites in Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and was co-director, with Lloyd Weeks (Armidale) and Cameron Petrie (Cambridge), of a joint Iranian-Australian archaeological project in the Mamasani district of western Fars Province, investigating the prehistory and early history of the area at Tol-e Nurabad, Tol-e Spid and Qaleh Kali. Since 2017 he has been collaborating with Karen Radner (Ludwig-Maximilian-University, Munich) on the excavation of Gird-i Rostam, a multi-period site in Iraqi Kurdistan. His book, Nomadism in Iran: From Antiquity to the Modern Era, published by Oxford University Press in 2014, was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2015 PROSE Awards (American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence) in the Archaeology and Anthropology category. In 2022 he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His most recent book, Aspects of Kinship in Ancient Iran (University of California Press, 2023), publishes the five Ehsan Yarshater Memorial Lectures that he delivered at UCLA in 2020.