Bronze Age Builders on the edge of the desert: Re-examining Wadi Suq period (2000 – 1600) settlement, lifeways, and resilience in southeast Arabia

The Wadi Suq period (2000-1600 BCE) of southeast Arabia has long been regarded as a period of collapse, abandonment, and transformations. Specifically in the realm of settlement, a sharp decline is observed both in number and scope when compared with the preceding period. This change is oftentimes explained in terms of network collapse, climatic upheavals, a combination of these two, or in terms of social tensions among the populations of the region themselves. As a reaction to these proposed changes, it has been suggested that the populations adopted a more mobile lifestyle, though which it became easier to exploit multiple resourceful environments in a model where different subsistence strategies could be combined. However, these theories are based on a limited understanding of Wadi Suq settlement, which is due to several reasons. Only few sites of this period are known, and when known, they are often insufficiently investigated to determine whether a shift in lifestyle did indeed...Show moreThe Wadi Suq period (2000-1600 BCE) of southeast Arabia has long been regarded as a period of collapse, abandonment, and transformations. Specifically in the realm of settlement, a sharp decline is observed both in number and scope when compared with the preceding period. This change is oftentimes explained in terms of network collapse, climatic upheavals, a combination of these two, or in terms of social tensions among the populations of the region themselves. As a reaction to these proposed changes, it has been suggested that the populations adopted a more mobile lifestyle, though which it became easier to exploit multiple resourceful environments in a model where different subsistence strategies could be combined. However, these theories are based on a limited understanding of Wadi Suq settlement, which is due to several reasons. Only few sites of this period are known, and when known, they are often insufficiently investigated to determine whether a shift in lifestyle did indeed occur. Furthermore, many of the sites are studied in isolation and are not compared to other sites or contextualized in a wider geographic picture, or they have been studied superficially as they were part of survey projects that focus on the identification and mapping of many sites at the same time in a wide geographical area. When the sites have been subject to more intensive investigations, they are often not published in much detail. This study has reviewed all current archaeological evidence for Wadi Suq settlement available to the author, by analyzing the relevant excavation reports or all relevant published material with the goal of creating a comparative framework and characterizing Wadi Suq settlement over the wider area of southeast Arabia. In doing so, a special attention was given to the identification of material traces that might signal a mobile configuration of the societies inhabiting these places. Finally, this wider view of Wadi Suq settlement has been applied to a case study in the hinterland of Sohar in the Batinah of Oman, an area for which little data about the Wadi Suq is currently available. By comparing three case study sites with the other Wadi Suq sites in terms of their qualitative properties on multiple scales (region, site, building), the case study sites were contextualized in the wider model of Wadi Suq period settlement in terms of landscape, site configurations, construction styles, and mobility. It was found that Wadi Suq settlement can be categorized into categories of settlement sites, tower sites, industrial sites, and temporary places, and that these sites interacted dynamically with each other along different scales of sedentism and mobility, the resources exploited, and the stylistic and technological ideas that were shared among them on the subjects of material culture and construction. The case study sites feature in this model as another variation in a highly varied settlement style that was adapted to the diverse environments encountered in southeast Arabia, showing similarities with several sites in construction, subsistence, and overall activities carried out while also displaying unique attributes in terms of the types of mobility that were employed by the community, as the motivation for recurrent visitation which seems to lie with particular hydrological conditions as well as a social anchoring through ancestral ties as seen in monumental funerary constructions. It is recommended that future work takes the mobility of populations in this period as aa starting point for analysis and that settlement remains are emphasized more to gain a more accurate understanding of the Wadi Suq period at large.Show less

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Bronze Age Builders on the edge of the desert: Re-examining Wadi Suq period (2000 – 1600) settlement, lifeways, and resilience in southeast Arabia