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UNITED ARAB EMIRATES ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES
Click on a letter below to access information on the individual Archaeological Sites.
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INTRODUCTION
The absence of a detailed written history is all too often interpreted
as an indication of a lack of history or historical events. In the context
of the UAE this impression, as archaeological and historical research
has shown, could not be further from the truth.
Since 1959, when archaeological excavations first began on Umm al-Nar
island near Abu Dhabi, archaeologists from a dozen countries, as well
as local officials from an ever-increasing number of museums throughout
the UAE, have been tracking the earliest residents of the Emirates from
the desert and islands of Abu Dhabi in the west to the mountains of Fujairah
in the east.
ARCHAEOLOGY REVIEW 2007
(For a full pdf version of this update from the UAE Yearbook 2007 please CLICK HERE)
Since the formal study of the archaeology of the UAE began, nearly 50 years ago, there has been one major query about the results from surveys and excavations that have taken place. Substantial evidence of human occupation in the past has been identified, stretching back into the Neolithic, or Late Stone Age, period, which commenced around 5500 BC, or 7500 years ago. Archaeologists have always considered it likely that ancient man was living in the Emirates long before that, but no sites had been found, and it was thought that any traces of earlier occupation must have been buried beneath the dunes, or under gravel and stones washed out by thousands of years of rainfall.
Over the course of the last year, however, evidence of earlier occupation, in the Palaeolithic period, going back many tens of thousands of years, has finally been found. The discoveries were made at Jebel Faiyah, a rocky outcrop in the east of Sharjah, by a team from Sharjah’s Directorate of Antiquities and Germany’s University of Tubingen, and were first announced at the annual Symposium on Recent Palaeontological and Archaeological Discoveries in the UAE, organised by the Zayed Centre for History and Heritage.
The site was used during several periods, with evidence of Iron Age occupation near the surface, some Bronze Age material just below that, and then artefacts from the Neolithic period at a depth of between 40 and 70 centimetres under the present surface. The joint Sharjah & Tubingen team then excavated to a total depth of over 2 metres beneath the present surface, finding around a metre of deposits below the Neolithic artefacts in which there was no evidence of occupation at all. Around 170 to 180 centimetres beneath the present surface, however, they found several flint tools that had clearly been worked by Man. Efforts to date the site properly are continuing, and further investigation is planned. But the archaeologists have assigned a provisional date in the early part of the Upper Pleistocene, which began around 125,000 years ago, and ended around 10,000 years ago, when today’s era of geological time, known as the Holocene, began. Nothing more is yet known about these early inhabitants of the Emirates, but a search is now under way for further sites of the same period.
While this discovery is the most significant to have been made over the last year in terms of studying the UAE’s past, there have been other important finds as well. Going back beyond the Pleistocene, to the Late Miocene period, around 6 to 8 million years ago, another site with fossil bones has been identified at Umm al-Ishtan, in the far west of the country. The bones were first discovered by animal rangers from the Environmental Agency – Abu Dhabi (EAD) who reported them to President HH Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan in late 2005. The President promptly ordered an investigation, and a team from the Abu Dhabi Islands Archaeological Survey (ADIAS) paid a visit to discover that the bones were not from camels, as the rangers had thought, but from the primitive elephant Stegotetrabeladon syrticus. Several bones have now been excavated and will eventually go on display in Abu Dhabi.
The presence of this ancient elephant in western Abu Dhabi was already known, but the Umm al-Ishtan site is much further inland than any other Late Miocene site, showing, yet again, that there is still much to discover about the UAE’s past.
More work by ADIAS, in association with the Department of Antiquities and Tourism in Al Ain, (now part of the new Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, ADACH), focused on Neolithic sites near Umm az-Zamul, in the south-eastern deserts of Abu Dhabi, where around 3000 individual stone artefacts have now been collected and mapped. One interesting discovery was a possible tomb of a type not previously recorded in the Emirates.
Other work has taken place in Abu Dhabi’s eastern city of Al Ain where a team from France’s Centre Nationale des Recherches Scientifiques (CNRS), working in association with the Department of Antiquities and Tourism, has undertaken an eighth year of excavations at a pit-grave at Hili that dates to the late Umm al-Nar period, just over 4000 years ago. The many hundreds of skeletons that have been recovered from the grave, as well as other associated material, has provided valuable data on the diet, health and customs of the people.
Although archaeologists have continued to devote attention to particular sites, of varying periods, a major current focus is on trying to understand the landscapes in which they are found, and assessing how these have evolved over thousands of years.
One recent study has been of the bay of Dhayah, in northern Ra’s al-Khaimah, which provides a cross-section through the coast, mangroves, palm gardens, gravel fans and mountains. Results show that the area has been occupied since at least the Hafit period (around 3200–2500 BC) onwards, with sites from the Wadi Suq period in the early second millennium BC, the Iron Age and into the Late Islamic period.Further studies of landscapes and their archaeological sites will play a major part in building up a more complete picture of the UAE’s history and heritage.
Finally, re-structuring of Abu Dhabi’s government during late 2005 and early 2006 saw the creation of the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH), which is now planning a unified approach to the study of Abu Dhabi’s past, including plans for what will be the capital city’s first – and long-awaited – museum. The Authority has absorbed the former Department of Antiquities and Tourism.
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