The Evolution of Human Populations in Arabia Paleoenvironments, Preh
The contemporary deserts of Arabia form some of the most dramatic arid landscapes in the world; yet, during many times in the past, the region was well-watered, containing evidence for rivers and lakes. Climatic fluctuations through time must have had a p
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Holocene (Re-)Occupation of Eastern Arabia Hans-Peter Uerpmann, D.T. Potts, and Margarethe Uerpmann
Keywords Fasad • Herders • Hunters • Neolithic • Pastoralists • PPNB • Sharjah
Introduction Population discontinuities on a micro-scale are familiar phenomena in the archaeological record of many parts of the world, and Western Asia is no exception. Multi-period sites often display stratigraphic features, gaps in ceramic sequences and distances between radiocarbon dates implying breaks in the history of settlement. However, there is often a presumption that if settlement evidence from one period is missing in one trench or set of associated trenches, it may be present elsewhere since not all areas necessarily contain the full stratigraphic record of occupation at any given site. Population discontinuities at a macroscale, such as a valley system or drainage zone, are equally common in settlement pattern studies, and de-population for periods ranging from centuries to millennia is familiar to most archaeologists who have worked at this scale. There is, however, another aspect of discontinuity which is rarely addressed directly by archaeologists working in Western Asia, even when it is observed, namely the issue of population continuity or discontinuity between the Pleistocene and the Holocene. Specialization in archaeology has had the unintended and unfortunate effect of compartmentalizing Paleolithic archaeology (and cognate fields like Pleistocene climatic and geological studies), turning it into a stand-alone field of study with little or no relationship to the study of later periods (Neolithic, H.-P. Uerpmann (*) and M. Uerpmann Institut für Ur- und Frühgeschichte und Archäologie des Mittelalters, Naturwissenschaftliche Archäologie, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Rümelinstr., 19-23, D-72070, Tübingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] D.T. Potts Department of Archaeology, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia e-mail: [email protected]
Chalcolithic, Bronze Age, etc.). Similarly, the perspective of scholars who work on the later periods of human history often fails to reach back in time beyond the ‘great’ Pleistocene– Holocene divide. In the present chapter we shall consider the specific case of eastern Arabia, where opinions on the matter of occupational continuity or discontinuity between the Pleistocene and the Holocene have been evolving rapidly in recent years.
The Arabian Paleolithic and the ‘Paleolithic’ of Eastern Arabia Beginning in the 1930s reports began to circulate of stone tools picked up at sites in Kuwait, eastern Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman (Potts, 1990). Thus, by the 1960s, when Danish archaeologists investigated lithic scatters in Qatar and eastern Saudi Arabia, they needed little convincing of the reality of Paleolithic occupation in the region (Kapel, 1967) and in this they were followed by other scholars working nearby (e.g., Masry, 1974; de Cardi, 1978). Terms like ‘handaxe’, ‘Levallois-Mousterian’ and ‘po
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