“A bay, not of water but of sandy waste”?: New perspectives on investigating dispersed Neolithic communities in northwest Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Historically, little attention has been paid to the thousands of prehistoric sites preserved across these diverse and varied landscapes of northwest Saudi Arabia. Through a series of new international and local partnerships, archaeological research is now illuminating the unique and regionally connected nature of the Neolithic period, beyond the better-known oases’ settlements of the Bronze and Iron Age.

Through multi-scalar methodologies, detailed evidence for the nature of Neolithic activity across this region is now being gathered. This paper will discuss the academic and cultural paradigms that have shaped studies in the region historically, and present current research regarding the local expression of Neolithisation. 

Results from three occupation sites across the diverse geological hinterlands of AlUla county will be used to illustrate the variability of localized adaptive strategies, and shared elements of material culture and socio-economies during the 6th and 5th Millennia BCE. Furthermore, in the absence of any known agricultural sedentary sites in the region during this time, the integration of site-specific chronologies and large-scale site distribution data is used to propose an occupation pattern that challenges the key Neolithic concepts of core and periphery for these landscapes. No longer should northwest Saudi Arabia be perceived as marginal, rather as a dispersed but interconnected community within a wider regional network of desert pastoralists.

About the Presenters

Jane McMahon

Jane McMahon is the Assistant Director of the Prehistoric AlUla and Khaybar Excavation Project and PhD Candidate in the Discipline of Archaeology at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the Neolithic occupation of northwest Arabia and exploring the role of cultural and environmental drivers of variability of Neolithisation processes. To this end, she seeks to develop novel, theoretically informed methodologies for the archaeological investigation of mobile populations in arid environments.