Bronze Age Burial Mounds on Bahrain

Abstract

The island of Bahrain has this century been notable for two main reasons: its identification as Dilmun (Telmun), known from Sumerian to Neo-Assyrian times, and the striking presence of thousands of burial mounds (a recent estimate is 172,000-Larsen 1983). Both have been the cause of some disagreement and difference of interpretation. Recent archaeological work has made the issue of the mounds, their place and interpretation, somewhat clearer. This is none too soon. Comparatively little effort has been made to elucidate the island's own internal archaeology. None of the numerous Bronze Age settlements on the island has been systematically excavated. Bahrain's archaeological framework, instead, is mostly based on the Danish Expedition's limited excavation of Qala'at al-Bahrain in the 1950s and 60s, which remains largely unpublished. One of the results of this lack of settlement exploration and the inadequate publication of that already carried out is that the dating of the burial mounds, or at least those of Bronze Age date, has proved problematic, as has the whole of Bahrain's archaeological sequence. Recent work elaborating the ceramic chronology of the North Wall Sounding at Qala'at al-Bahrain by Larsen has been of considerable help. This has enabled broad guidelines to be established for the ceramic sequence from about 2300 B.C. to around 1700 B.C., the period to which the mounds date. Since 1981-82 thousands of burial mounds have been excavated as part of a rescue programme on the site of a new city in central Bahrain (Figs. 1 and 2). Two main types have been recorded. The first is the common type, of which the ideal version is the high conical form of which several hundred have been preserved to the north of Hamad Town, the new city, south of the highway. In the excavations this moundfield was code-named B-North. Barbar mounds elsewhere take on the mainly low profile of the mounds at Sar, or large, flattened mounds such as those found to the south of Hamad Town (code-named B-South). During 1982-83 B-South mounds were excavated on the eastern side of the moundfields opposite Karzakan (Fig. 2). Structurally the Barbar mounds are mostly single burials with a centrally-built chamber covered by capstones and surrounded by a low ringwall. Both ringwall and chamber were built of unworked limestone blocks. The fill between the ringwall and burial chamber is earth. The construction of the Barbar mound is often marked by a small mound which for some time stood around the chamber, presumably while it waited for its interment (Fig. 3). Subsidiary burials of infants and sub-adults were sometimes placed to the south of the mound against the outside face of the ringwall. Orientation of the chamber was calculated by astronomical determinations (Cornwall 1952).