Re-writing the late prehistory of south-eastern Arabia: a reply to Jocelyn Orchard

Abstract

In a pair of recent articles Jocelyn Orchard has presented what is arguably the most radical interpretation of late fourth and third millennium BC cultural development in the Oman peninsula to appear since archaeological excavations began in this region during the 1950s. Her theses challenge many aspects of current thinking and as such deserve to be scrutinised by all scholars working in East and South Arabian archaeology. Moreover, given the fact that Orchard has reviewed the status of the Jamdat Nasr pottery found in the Hafit-type graves of Oman and the United Arab Emirates, it is important that Mesopotamian specialists examine what she has said about relations between Jamdat Nasr Mesopotamia and the Oman peninsula.In an effort to extract the salient points from Orchard's 1994 and 1995 articles I shall both quote directly and paraphrase her theses in point form. In this way I believe it will be easier to see how her argument is constructed out of a series of interlocking propositions.1. In 1994 Orchard coined the term “Al-Hajar oasis towns”, asserting that these differed from so-called “Umm an-Nar settlements”. The two settlement types, she maintained, had been conflated erroneously by scholars working in the area in part because of “the fact that on a number of sites Umm an-Nar tombs are found intermingled with al-Hajar buildings”. Orchard, however, argued that “these two types of third millennium settlement are very different in style” (Orchard 1994: 63). She characterised the Umm an-Nar buildings — in actual fact she only means tombs — as being “built wholly or in part of white limestone”, which differed from the “al-Hajar form of masonry-revetted platform construction”. “Indeed”, she wrote, speaking of the ceramic evidence for such a partitioning of third millennium culture in the Oman peninsula, “the general assumption that all third millennium wares found in the al-Hajar region represent a single culture is curious in view of the fact that three groups of wares can be distinguished, each of which is firmly associated with a different milieu (viz. Umm an-Nar tombs, settlements on Umm an-Nar and Ghanadha islands and al-Hajar settlements)” (Orchard 1994: 64).