Tepe Yahya

These were the self-described hunter gatherers, the group that gathered at the Hays Bickford cafeteria near Harvard Square, talking shop, arguing about field methods, gossiping about professors, and living the kind of close quarters social existence that small academic departments tend to produce.

In the summer of 1968, Jane joined a team of doctoral candidates on an archeological dig at Tepe Yahya, a mound site in southeastern Iran led by a young tenured professor named Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky.

The dig was significant.

The team believed they had found the ruins of a fortress connected to Alexander the Great dating back to 325 BCE.

She thrived in the field.

The work was physical, intellectually demanding, and far removed from the committee meetings and campus politics back in Cambridge.

It was also at Tepe Yahya that she met James Humphreys, a fellow graduate student who was 27 at the time.

They had first crossed paths during a spring 1968 seminar preparing for the expedition, and the relationship deepened over weeks of digging in the Iranian heat.