Basic Biographical Information
James “Jimmy” Mellaart was born on 14 November 1925 in London to Dutch parents with whom he returned to the Netherlands in 1930. It was in the Netherlands that he first developed a fascination for antiquity in school, particularly while working at the National Museum of Antiquities at Leiden during the Nazi occupation.
In 1947, Mellaart returned to London to study history and Egyptology at University College London. In his formative years around the time of his graduation in 1951, he took part in excavations in different parts of the Near East, including Jericho and Fikirtepe in Turkey, where he met his future wife Arlette. Soon after he graduated, he started working with the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara (BIAA), where he was appointed as Assistant Director in 1959. Archaeologists at the BIAA, which was founded in 1948, were working in central Anatolia, exploring a part of the Near East that had previously received little archaeological...
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References
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Further Reading
The Telegraph. James Mellaart, 3 August 2012. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/9450610/James-Mellaart.html (accessed 28 May 2013).
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Rogasch, J. (2014). Mellaart, James. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_2491
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