Norman Yoffee is Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, USA.Jeffrey J. Clark is a senior project director of Desert Archaeology in Tucson. He has conducted research in the Tonto Basin and neighboring areas for the past ten years.

""The work reported in this book has revolutionized our understanding of the late prehistory of Iraq and the Near East as a whole. . . . This collection offers as thorough a set of preliminary excavation reports as one can find in the archeological literature on the Near East, and the volume is handsomely illustrated in a way that makes in possible actually to work with the materials."" —Science