The Archaeology of the Arabian Peninsula 2

Beschreibung

The volume presents the proceedings of the second international workshop on the Archaeology of the Arabian Peninsula. Its subtitle, 'Connecting the evidence', portrayed our striving for investigating relationships and connections between different regions, materials and themes of research. The nine contributions straddle the entire expanse of the Peninsula and beyond, in order to counter the present divide in different academic disciplines. The chronological focus spans from the Pre Pottery Neolithic, the Bronze and Iron Ages down to the Islamic Middle Ages. The analyzed themes range from funerary to cultic landscapes, oasis formation and role of metallurgy for desert dwellers in state-of-the-art interdisciplinary perspectives and field case studies.
The volume presents the proceedings of the second international workshop on the Archaeology of the Arabian Peninsula. Following the first publication on the archaeology of Arabia (OREA 4), this second volume is devoted to connecting the evidence across the Arabian Peninsula and bridging the gap between traditionally distinct scholarly fields. Spanning a chronological range from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) to the Islamic period and encompassing regions from the south-eastern tip to the north-eastern corner of the subcontinent, from Oman to the Negev and the Red Sea, we commit to reconstructing a broader, more interconnected picture of the archaeology of this underexplored, vast territorial expanse. In this edition we discuss the formation of the oldest peri-maritime settled communities of the Neolithic and investigate similarities and dissimilarities in landmarks, territorial appropriation and environmental conditions of the Early Bronze Age funerary landscape (al-Kharj oasis) and the settlement landscape created by the early-3rd-millennium-BCE emergence of Hejazi ‘urbanism’ in the most ancient megasites of the peninsula, the famous walled oases of Qurayyah and Tayma. We highlight the varied modalities of cultic landscapes of nomadic pastoral peoples in the Negev and Oman and the symbolic value of copper-alloy metallurgy, and investigate epigraphic and regional trade connections and routes throughout an extended region, as well as the formation of mining landscapes and specialised sites for the selective exploitation of mineral resources such as copper, silver and gold (Al-Baha area) in the Islamic period. The book offers the first answers to questions of agency, networks, chronologies and the complex legacy of reconstructing history based on Greek, Roman and the far from comprehensive local epigraphic evidence.

Autor*in

Marta Luciani
is Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology and History at the Institute of Near Eastern Studies, University of Vienna

Themen in »The Archaeology of the Arabian Peninsula 2«

Arabian Peninsula Oasis formation Pottery chronology Neolithic Bronze Age Iron Age Islamic Period Cultic landscapes Funerary landscapes Metallurgy

Stimmen zu »The Archaeology of the Arabian Peninsula 2«

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