The Penn Museum's first archaeological expedition to Iran took place in 1931, when Erich F. Schmidt excavated the Bronze Age site of Tepe Hissar near the town of Damghan and the monumental buildings of the pre-Islamic Sasanian Palace.

In this part of his adventurous and courageous life Schmidt, then a young German WWI veteran who had received his Ph.D. degree under Franz Boas at Columbia University, documented the project with nearly 2,600 culturally significant photos-many under far from ideal conditions-of desert and mountain tribes, the sites, government administrators, and a full panoply of the people he encountered from Fara (Iraq), Damghan, Tepe Hissar, Persepolis, including aerial reconnaissance.

Gursan-Salzmann has selected 64 memorable and instructive prints from the Museum's archives for the book's interior and has assembled dozens more from the Schmidt Collection, Chicago's Oriental Institute, and from family members for an accompanying CD-ROM. She helps readers interpret the cultural and physical landscapes of the Iran and Iraq of nearly 75 years ago as their ethnographic and historical treasures came to light.