ROBERT J. BRAIDWOOD was one of the most distinguished and influential figures in Near Eastern archaeology. An Emeritus Professor at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, he is best known for his innovative investigations of the origins of settled farming communities, the so-called Neolithic Revolution, and for the development of truly interdisciplinary methods of field research. So successful has this initiative proved that it is difficult now to remember that at the time of his early work in the foothills of the Zagros mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan, nothing was known in the Near East of events between the end of the Pleistocene and the 6th millennium BC.

Braidwood was an early proponent of the use of radiocarbon dating (Willard Libby, who developed the technique, was a Chicago colleague), which enabled him to demonstrate that agricultural economies had developed earlier and more slowly than had previously been supposed. His multidisciplinary, ecological approach was of particular value in providing a new framework within which such changes in prehistoric economies could be investigated. In particular he was able to question not only existing assumptions concerning the role of post-Pleistocene desiccation in the trend towards settled life and early food production, but also to propose the actual geographical areas in which one would expect to find evidence for such change (the Nuclear Zone theory).

In later years he was to carry these investigations into the foothills of western Iran (1960) and southeastern Turkey, where his excavations at the site of Cayonu, organised together with Turkish colleagues, remain one of the most significant projects undertaken at this time, not only in the reconstruction of the ecological and cultural conditions within which effective food production was achieved but in providing rich social and ritual evidence from the 8th millennium BC. This Joint Chicago-Istanbul Prehistoric Project was innovative in another important respect; it provided a highly successful example of the type of research carried out collaboratively with local archaeologists and scientists that is becoming widespread in the Near East and is clearly the way of the future.

Braidwood was also one of the first archaeologists in the Near East to carry out the type of systematic survey that has in more recent years provided a basic component of archaeological data, first in the late 1930s in the Amuq plain west of Aleppo, subsequently in the Kurdish foothills (the Iraq-Jarmo project, 1948) and more recently in the areas around Urfa and Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey (1963), which led to the identification and excavation of Cayonu (1968 onwards). Indeed his fieldwork was among the most influential in transforming prehistory into a disciplined field of scholarship. He had a style and presence that appealed to the public, which made him highly successful in bringing Near Eastern prehistory to a larger audience.

Braidwood was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1907. He studied architecture at the University of Michigan, taking his MA there in 1933. At Michigan he took a course in Near Eastern archaeology, which led to an invitation to join the university’s excavations at the Seleucid-Parthian site of Seleucia on the Tigris, just south of Baghdad. His first publication was on the gold jewellery from the site, an unusual beginning for one who was to become a leading prehistorian. In 1933 he was hired by James Henry Breasted, founder of the Oriental Institute in Chicago, to work on excavations in the Amuq plain. In 1937 he married Linda, a Michigan graduate and fellow archaeologist, with whom he was to share a life of successful academic collaboration and a deep personal commitment and contentment.

During the war Braidwood was in charge of a meteorological mapping programme at the University of Chicago for the Army Air Corps, and he completed his PhD there in 1943. In 1947 he and Linda resumed their fieldwork, with a focus now on the great gap that existed then between the nomadic hunter-gatherers of the Upper Palaeolithic and the period when settled food-producing communities appeared. This research that was to occupy the remainder of their lives.

Braidwood’s publications include a very readable volume, Prehistoric Men, which achieved eight editions and was translated into Turkish and Chinese; Mounds in the Plain of Antioch, an archeological survey (1937); and Prehistoric Investigations in Iraqi Kurdistan (1960, with Bruce Howe); together the Braidwoods wrote Excavations in the Plain of Antioch, the earlier assemblages (1960); and in 1953 a charming volume describing life at Jarmo during the 1950-51 season, Digging Beyond the Tigris, was published by Linda. She was made a Research Associate at the Oriental Institute, which did not then allow the employment of husband and wife, and continued to work there and in the field on their joint projects. In 1954 their fieldwork with colleagues from the natural sciences gained them one of the first grants for anthropological research made by the National Science Foundation.

He is survived by a son and daughter.

Robert Braidwood, archaeologist, was born on July 29, 1907. He died on January 15, 2003, aged 95. His wife also died on January 15, 2003, aged 93.