Ë¿¹ÏÊÓƵ

Funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the German Research Foundation (DFG), the States of Clay project is a collaboration between the Ë¿¹ÏÊÓƵ and the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, with Roger and Barbara Helwing as Co-PIs, Amy Richardson and Helen Gries as Co-Is and Heike Dohmann as postdoctoral researcher.
In the States of Clay project, we apply an integrated scientific methodology to selected clay bureaucratic objects (tablets, sealings), or CBOs, to maximise their interpretive potential for understanding early urban and state level societies of Mesopotamia. Our focus is on the millennium 3700-2700 BCE, when major sites such as Uruk (often cited as 'the world's first city'), Ur, Jemdet Nasr, Fara, Brak, Nineveh and many others rose to prominence within networks of interregional engagement across Mesopotamia and adjacent regions. While all these centres used CBOs to administer their resources in a range of ways, they each developed divergent patterns of CBO usage through space and time. In this project we are articulating these patterns of clay use across a thousand years of urban rise and fall. 

See also: Matthews, R. & Richardson, A. 2018. . World Archaeology 50.5, 723-747.

Partly funded by the British Institute of Persian Studies, Roger worked with colleagues Amy Richardson, Hassan Fazeli Nashli, and Donna de Groene to produce a major article articulating and evaluating long-term trends and patterns in the uses of counting, sealing, and writing in Iran from periods covering the Early Neolithic to the end of the Iron Age. A total of 45,000 objects from 99 archaeological sites feature in this analysis, which can be viewed at:

Matthews, R., Richardson, A., de Groene, D. and Fazeli Nashli, H. 2025. Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 12.2: 215-306.

CZAP is a collaborative UK-Iraq-Iran project investigating the Early Neolithic of eastern Iraq and western Iran through excavation of several sites. This project was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council for four years from January 2011. It has also been supported by grants from the British Academy, National Geographic Society, the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, the British Institute of Persian Studies, the Society of Antiquaries of London, and the Wainwright Fund for Near Eastern Archaeology. From October 2018 to September 2024, this project was supported by a European Research Council Advanced Grant entitled

Roger co-directs, with Wendy Matthews and Kamal Rasheed Raheem, ongoing excavations at the Early Neolithic sites of Zawi Chemi Rezan and Bestansur in Iraqi Kurdistan. Bestansur's importance is recognised by its status on the

Major CZAP publications include:

Matthews, R., Matthews, W., Rasheed Raheem, K. & Richardson, A.  (eds). 2020. CZAP Reports Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

Matthews, R., Matthews, W. & Mohammadifar, Y. (eds). 2013. The Earliest Neolithic of Iran: 2008 Excavations at Sheikh-e Abad and Jani. CZAP Reports Vol. 1. Oxford: British Institute of Persian Studies and Oxbow Books.

Funded by a Marie Skłodowska Curie Incoming International Fellowship, 2011-2013, Roger worked for ten years with colleague Professor Hassan Fazeli Nashli of Tehran University to produce a major ground-breaking volume on the Archaeology of Iran:
Matthews, R. & Fazeli Nashli, H. 2022. Routledge.