He was chief scientist in many excavations on Iranian ancient sites including Marlik, near Rudbar, Haft Tepe, near Susa and Ahvaz, where he founded a museum to showcase artifacts from the site, and on the plane of Hamadan province, where a training center for students was established.
While he introduced and encouraged a more scientific approach to the field from the time he was appointed to the Department of Archaeology in 1956, starting in 1967, when he became chairman of the department, he reworked the curriculum around a significant component of fieldwork, mandatory for all students starting in 1970–1971.
To facilitate this he established a base-camp of the department's field school on the Qazvin Plain at the site of a restored Safavid caravanserai, and secured a long-term permit to conduct field work from the Archaeological Service of Iran.
The Institute for Archeology, which he founded in 1959 and where he served as Director until 1979, played a critical role in these improvements by providing instructors and students with office space, and laboratory and library facilities to analyse the results of fieldwork and publish articles.
He was also a good friend of British archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, former widower of Agatha Christie.