His parents were Commonwealth Edison employees and the family lived in South Shore, Chicago.
He also worked part time at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies as an undergraduate at Columbia.
[1] His doctoral thesis focused on commodity trade in Southwest Asia during the Bronze Age.
He is the author of many books, 140 articles and reviews on the archaeology of the Ancient Near East and has conducted fieldwork in Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia.
He was a member of the editorial board of the scholarly journal Antiguo Oriente.