Cheshmeh Ali is a small Late Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlement excavated by Erich Schmidt as part of a joint project between the University Museum in Philadelphia and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 1934 and 1936. Erich Schmidt was a prolific field archaeologist and he worked at a number of other projects in Iran, including the excavation of medieval Rayy, Persepolis, Tepe Hissar, as well as conducting a general aerial survey of Iran from his airplane. While the bulk of Schmidt’s energy in his later years was spent on the publication of the Achaemenid center of Persepolis, post-excavation work on the prehistoric Cheshmeh Ali records languished and the final reports were unfinished at Schmidt’s death in 1964. Although Schmidt published a small selection of the more spectacular of the painted pottery vessels from the site, no architectural plans,no detailed stratigraphic sections, nor comprehensive catalogue of finds were ever published.
Despite this paucity of published details, Cheshmeh Ali figures prominently in the culture historical schemes of northern Iran. For example, Cheshmeh Ali, along with Tepe Sialk, formed a significant part of McCown’s landmark chronological studies of Iran in 1942. Having examined the Cheshmeh Ali painted pottery housed in Philadelphia, McCown delineated three successive painted pottery traditions for northern Iran: the Sialk horizon, the Cheshmeh Ali horizon, and the Hissar horizon. This scheme has, with modification, endured. In a more recent synthesis of Iranian chronology, Voigt and Dyson (1992) defined the Cheshmeh Ali ceramic horizon as extending over a number of geographical regions and characterized by the presence of high-fired black-on-red painted ware, as found at the north-central Iranian sites of Zagheh, Sialk, Kara Tepe and Ismailabad (Tepe Moushelan), as well as the type site of Cheshmeh Ali. Thus, following McCown’s lead, the “Cheshmeh Ali ceramic horizon” became synonymous with what is now termed the early Transitional Chalcolithic period, and the site is still frequently cited in the literature.
