UNE Archaeology’s Professor Lloyd Weeks is preparing to lead an international team to the desert in the Middle East this November, in an attempt to better understand how people survived the challenging climate conditions of the Bronze Age.
The team will focus on a site at Shimal – a small, flat piece of arid land wedged between mountains and coast in South East Arabia (today’s UAE and Oman). While it could soon be listed as a UNESCO World Heritage protection site, its treasures aren’t as obvious to the eye as in some of the larger centres of the ancient world of Mesopotamia, but it tells an important part of the story.
Dating back to 2000-1000 years BCE, Shimal is one of the few-known Middle and Late Bronze Age settlements in South East Arabia. Its most prominent archaeological record lies in hundreds of collective tombs.
But the UNE-led team will also be interested in uncovering everyday remains and artefacts that shed light on how the settlement adapted and survived at a time that probably felt like the known world was falling in.
“The Late Bronze Age – c. 1600-1200 BCE – is a fascinating time and place in the ancient world, because it’s where everything goes pear-shaped in Arabia and the Middle East,” Professor Weeks explains.
“It’s a time affected by a number of crises, including catastrophic climate events that changed human civilisation.”
As only the second UNE-led expedition to the site, following on from one in 2023, the aim will primarily be to note where important deposits of remains of particular materials and particular periods can be found.
UNE’s Associate Professor Melanie Fillios, an expert in zooarchaeology who will join the expedition, says remains like shells and animal bone hold critical information.
“Everyone needs to eat. So remains like bones, fish and shell provide the primary evidence of how people adapted to their environment. What they ate tells us what they had to do to survive in a rapidly changing environment,” A/Prof Fillios says.
“The settlement also traded via sea with some of the larger societies in Mesopotamia and Bahrain, and evidence of changes in trade activity over time will also provide important information.
“Eventually, we hope to be able to examine how people were able to live and thrive in the face of a worsening climate, and how they adapted their subsistence practices and cultural behaviours in order to be resilient.
“In that way, Shimal is a small corner of the Bronze Age story of human development, but also one with modern-day resonance.”
The site has thrown up some interesting clues into community adaptation and survival.
“Most populations earlier in the Bronze Age seems to have been largely sedentary, relying on domesticated animals to survive as well as the date palm, and crops that could be grown in its shade. But at Shimal, there are also huge shell middens, pointing to large-scale exploitation of marine resources late in the Bronze Age,” Professor Weeks says.
“We think this reflects, in part, a community responding to climate deterioration – particularly, reduced rainfall, that can be documented in the region from 2000 BCE.”
The international team from the US, Germany, the UK as well as Australia will also bring specialist skills and knowledge in plant remains and charcoal analysis, analysis of human remains, radiometric dating and analysis of marine reservoir effects, physical geography, past environment and climate reconstruction and archaeological illustration.
The team will spend the six-week expedition excavating the remains of settlements and associated rubbish deposits, as well as excavating burials from this time period to access skeletal material for a range of analyses to explore aspects of the population, such as health, nutrition, diet, and social status. They will also collect samples to determine the ancient climate and environment of the site, and examine how this might have changed through time from c. 2000-1000 BCE.
“However, with our pilot work, we are not trying so much to conclusively answer a lot of questions about social responses to climate change, but to demonstrate that the site holds archives of materials of the right types and dates to answer those questions,” Professor Weeks says.
The expedition is also a chance for UNE archaeology students to put their skills to practice with some exciting hands-on field-work. This season two UNE students will join the team, with research forming the foundation of two master’s projects.
“We undertake a lot of fieldwork in Australia and overseas as part of the diverse research across the archaeology discipline, so each one generates access to archaeological sites for our students if they’d like to be involved,” A/Prof Fillios says.
“Fieldwork provides essential training in archaeology skills and methods. It shows students how archaeology all comes together, and provides the research context for postgraduate studies, where students can collect and analyse their own data. The opportunities at UNE are plentiful.”
Archaeology fieldwork relies on funding, and the Shimal project has so far been funded by the Society of Antiquaries of London, through their Beatrice De Cardi Awards.
Professor Weeks and his team are also grateful for very significant in-kind support from the hosts, managers and collaborators through the Department of Antiquities and Museums of the Government of Ras al-Khaimah, UAE, particularly its Director Mr Ahmed Altenaiji, and Chief Archaeologist Mr Christian Velde. Individual collaborators also bring considerable in-kind funding from their host institutions.
The project is currently under review for an Australian Research Council grant.
