Funerary Landscapes, Contacts and Mobility in Bronze Age Northwest Arabia

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The interdisciplinary project is aimed at investigating systematically for the first time an extended cemetery area of a north-western Arabian oasis. Its focus lies on a funerary landscape with burials of the Early Bronze Age and the Middle Bronze Age (c. 3000 – 1500 BCE), a period of fundamental changes in societies all over the ancient Near East. In the surroundings of the oasis of Tayma (Saudi Arabia), a major commercial hub on the subsequent Incense Road, thousands of graves visible on the modern surface are preserved. Until today, they have not been object of systematic investigations or study. A number of graves which have been recently excavated in the frame of salvage operations contained weapons which are known mainly in Syria and the Levant as indicating the social status of the deceased. These new discoveries raised a debate on the circumstances of their appearance in north-western Arabia and their meaning. In this context, the supra-regional mobility of groups or individuals as well as the wide distribution of certain ritual burial practices have been called into discussion and are in need of in-depth research.The present investigation, by using a wide range of methods, aims at identifying archaeological and biological factors relevant to the social differentiation within a Bronze Age oasis society in north-western Arabia, exploring and exposing the burials’ social biases. The completed excavations in the settlement of Tayma provided already some evidence for the social organisation of the oasis. The project is also oriented towards reconstructing lifestyle and subsistence strategies of the population living in the ancient oasis and its surroundings. At the same time the interconnections between sedentary oasis dwellers and mobile groups will be investigated.Since ancient or recent manipulations and disturbances of graves may hamper interpretation, these phenomena, in a preparatory phase of the project will be carefully investigated in order to test the validity of the archaeological and biological sources and the applied methodology for further, more intensive research.In the context of a continuous destruction of the graves due to the expanding modern settlement, the project contributes to the preservation of an outstanding cultural landscape. On the long run, connecting the evidence from burials with the excavation results from the settlement will allow for a reconstruction of socio-biological processes of adaptation within the environmental context of a north-western Arabian oasis.