The Medes Project is an outgrowth of the Godin project, which sought to investigate the major, multi-period site of Godin in Iran. Originally excavated by a Canadian team in the 1960s and 1970s, the project was taken over by Mitchell Rothman and Hilary Gopnik. The results of this investigation were published in the volume On The High Road: The History of Godin Tepe, Iran, which includes Pam Crabtree’s analysis of the animal bone remains from the site..
Following the acquisition of a large grant in 2021, present investigations of the site are centered on the Iron Age (Level II) findings from the site, which correspond to the empire of the Medes (first millennium BCE). The Medes Project seeks to answer the question of whether the Empire of the Medes was truly an empire. The goal is to see where the sheep and goats that we identified in the faunal assemblage actually came from. Is this really an empire, or is this simply a much smaller city-state?