Kamyar Abdi
Kamyar Abdi (; born 1969) is an Iranian archaeologist. He is the editor of the Iranian "Journal of Archaeology and History", a Research Associate at the Iranian Center for Research on Humanities and Cultural Studies, and professor at Department of Archaeology at Shiraz University. He was the deputy director of the National Museum of Iran in 2011. Biography. Kamyar Abdi was born in 1969 in Tabriz, Iran. Abdi received his M.A. degree in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at University of Chicago (1997). He continued his studied and received his Ph.D. from University of Michigan in Anthropology (2002), his  advisor was Henry T. Wright and his dissertation was titled "Strategies of herding: Pastoralism in the middle Chalcolithic period of the West Central Zagros Mountains". From 2002 until 2008, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth College. His research interests include sedentism, food production (agriculture and pastoralism), and political developments in the ancient Near East, especially Iran. He has directed archaeological projects at Malyan (ancient Anshan), Arjan, Sorkh Dom Lori, and Ziviyeh. In the late 1990s he led the Islamabad Archeological Research Project which discovered an ancient Neanderthal tooth which has been extensively studied, and as  of 2019, it has confirmed the existence of Neanderthals in Iran roaming in the Zagros Mountains as far back as 40 to 70 thousand years ago. He also formerly was a Visiting Professor at Department of Archaeology in Tarbiat Modarres University in Tehran. In 2017 he joined Shiraz University as a Full Professor.