Figure 1. Sampling a 12m sediment profilein the Wadi Sana, Hadramawt.
Figure 1. Sampling a 12m sediment profilein the Wadi Sana, Hadramawt.
With the support of AIYS through a NMERTAProject Grant, Dr. Joy McCorriston of University of Minnesota, led aninterdisciplinary collaboration of scholars and students (Dr.Abdalaziz bin Aqil, Dr. Ingrid Hehmeyer, Zakariah Johnson, RussanneLow, Dr. Louise Martin, Abdal Basit Nama'an, Dr. Eric Oches, Dr.Pieter Vlag) to Hadramawt Province of southern Yemen. There the teamconducted an archaeological survey and test excavations to exploreearly settlement and early agricultural strategies that took placeduring a dynamic period of global climatic change 9000-5000 yearsago. The team included geologists, archaeologists, a Yemeniethnographer, and General Organization of Antiquities, Museums andManuscripts representatives and spent several months in extremelyremote regions of southern Yemen's arid plateau, today only occupiedby bedouin herders and their kin in isolated tiny farming oases.Without the generous logistical support of CANADIAN OCCIDENTALPETROLEUM LTD. (CANOXY-YEMEN) with its outstanding commitment topreserving natural and cultural resources in its concession area, itwould have been nearly impossible for the RASA team to work in soremote a region. But the effort and persistence in exploring anarchaeologically new area led to exciting new discoveries.
Figure 2. Extensive burnt surface exposed by recent erosion in the Wadi Sana. Such surfaces have been clearly burned in situ (as determined by magnetic profiles, reddened substrate, and grain size) and indicate much greater vegetation cover probably linked to more moist climate in the past.
The RASA team hoped to find evidence of thefirst peoples to reoccupy southern Arabia after the hyperarid phaseof the last Ice Age. We think people moved or expanded into Arabia,which offered a new frontier when stronger seasonal monsoon windsblew greater rainfall over the subcontinent in the first half of theHolocene. Little is known of these people--they carried with themstone tool technologies reminiscent of the eastern Mediterranean, butthey occupied a land at the crux of the Indian Ocean. What else didthey obtain from eastern Mediterranean lands, and what links did theyhave with peoples there? Did they also have links with East Africa orwith South Asia? In all three regions, independent peoplesdomesticated different packages of crops and animals using differenttechnologies. Since domesticates from all these regions appear inlater Arabia, the earliest occupants settled a frontier infarming&emdash;potentially they could mix and match from a wide arrayof domesticates. The particular mixes and timing of agriculturaladoptions and adaptations in Arabia can tell us about the fundamentalreasons people chose agriculture, whether because climates andenvironments are changing so that food procurement must also change,or because people are what they do, choosing to farm as their kin ortrading partners do to express a sense of identity withthem.
With these interests, we headed for thesouthern Jol, the mountain plateau between southern Yemen's coast andthe well-known Wadi Hadramawt of the interior. Our reasoning wasthus: early Holocene prehistoric people have left almost no tracenear the sites where Iron Age Hadramawt kingdoms--Raybun andShabwa--sprang up. Yet such kingdoms could not arise without a deepcultural history of settlement, agriculture, and exchange. We soughtthe evidence for these societies in the uplands where water andlandscape would once have been attractive for settlement but now aretoo arid to sustain more than a few scattered communities and mobileherders. With few modern people around to disturb them,archaeological remains should be well-preserved.
Figure 3. Burnt surface in section. One of three stratified burnt surfaces in this profile, the visible surface as a dark horizontal line on the right has been radiocarbon dated earlier than 5880 BP (4775 BC).
In the Wadi Sanaa drainage system where theGerman Archaeological Institute and other travellers had alreadydocumented stone tools and monuments dating from 5000 to 2000 yearsago, the RASA team set out to investigate a gravel stream bar denselystrewn with 5000 year old stone tools and heavy blocks of stone. Ourinitial hopes that this might mark the remains of a settlement seemunfounded after several weeks of careful excavation. We recoveredhundreds of tools and blanks of several raw materials from thesurface but not a chip of worked chert below ground. The blocks ofstone, some as tall as an adult and nearly a meter wide, had beendislodged through strong stream currents. But because lighter, fine,uneroded silts underlay the blocks, it seems more likely that humans,rather than water, carried blocks to the site. If ever a settlementhad been, it was swept out and jumbled by wadi action before lateNeolithic (so-called Habarut) people fashioned their stone tools onthe site.
At this particular site, in Wadi Shumylya,the team was still compelled to explain the jumbled alignment andconcentration of large stone blocks. As a working hypothesis, TheRASA team believes we discovered what may be of the oldest evidenceof agricultural technology in Arabia--a now nearly destroyedagricultural check dam. A layer of stone tools dating to about 5000years ago overlies the stream gravel bar that washed out andcollected in a strong flood around the stone blocks we think wereused to build the check dam. Because the stone tools appear to be inthe place they were dropped, we know that our putative dam (if we arecorrect in our interpretation of the stone blocks) and itsdestruction must be older than 5000 years. No similar agriculturaltechnology is known from this date, but Tony Wilkinson and MacGuireGibson's work suggests terraces in northern Yemen's highlands mayalso date back about 5000 years. Field silts from the desert marginsalso began to accrue around this period, suggesting that as peoplebegan to practice agriculture, they used different technologies indifferent environments.
The project objectives include investigationfor evidence of early landscape management and environmental impactby humans. Agriculture--practiced by erecting shallow check dams toslow water flow and encourage silt deposit in gullies and streambeds--would play an important part in landscape management. Projectgeologists Drs. Rick Oches and Pieter Vlag in the field and Dr. SubirBanerjee of the Institute for Rock Magnetism devised other approachesthat also promise insights into former environments and changesthrough time. The RASA team cleared, described and sampled 7 wadisections in the mouth of Wadi Shumylya. By matching field andlaboratory descriptions of grain size and sediments with profiles ofvarious magnetic parameters (e.g., magnetic susceptibility) projectgeologists expect to develop sophisticated understanding of sedimenttransport and formation, perhaps even correlating sections widelyspaced in the wadi system. Such studies offer an important tool forunderstanding the changeable wadi environment in which humanoccupation must have occurred. Only if we understand theenvironmental context can we make sense of our current puzzle--Wherewere human settlements?
The RASA team conducted an archaeologicalsurvey in the lower Wadi Shumylya, but we found only evidence ofmonuments and agricultural works. We would have to conclude from thisseason's results that people practiced agriculture withoutsettlement, a proposition that runs counter to basic tenets ofeconomic lifestyle elsewhere in prehistory. So to probe this enigma,we expanded our area of coverage to include the upstream (southern)tributaries of Wadi Idem, where we hoped to find settlements that wecould compare with Wadi Shumylya. After several weeks, the team didfinally find evidence for long-term (sedentary or semi-sedentary)human occupation.
The RASA team discovered an early settlementof more than 80 structures alongside deposits made by a now defunctset of springs. We excavated hearths and midden dumped into theconstruction of a terrace, and we hope to use the layout of houses,the debris within them, and especially wood and bone from hearths tounderstand how people organized themselves and their settlements,what they ate and how they procured it. We suspect this settlement atShi'b Munayder is the earliest reported in Hadramawt (perhaps around7000 years old), but we await the results of C14 dating of charcoalfrom a hearth. Local Hadrami people and Yemeni archaeologists and areexcited by the discovery of a settlement they recognize as
- 'complete in enough of the different kinds of structures and in such a state of
- preservation that...it will open wide horizons to the project in the future
- study of this kind of settlement. A detailed study from sufficient evidence of
- the domestic and economic life, the political organization, the architecture,
- the society, the people and the culture, [might someday offer the potential to]
- distinguish the kinship relations among [inhabitants] and...[to clarify the
- cultural sequence of the region].' (Dr. Abdalaziz Ja'afur bin Aqil, General Director of the General Organization of Antiquities and Museums in Hadramawt Province and member of the RASA team, speaking to the daily AL-AYAM in Mukalla, Yemen, April 1998)
Figure 4. Partially excavated Neolithic Pit House constructed and occupied between 5806-5616 BP (4689 BC-4456 BC).
Somewhat to our surprise, we turned up noindications in the course of fieldwork that the occupants of thissettlement practiced agriculture. There were no clearly associatedagricultural works nearby, no tools convincingly for reaping orhoeing, and no seeds. Thus we seem to have a paradox--Settlementwithout agriculture, Agriculture without settlement.
There is, of course, much work to be done onthe samples brought back from this season and in planning how best toaddress the questions we raised. We borrowed for study many stonetools and brought sediment and charred plant fragments for analysisat the University of Minnesota. Anthropology students and graduatesupervisors are working on the analysis of plant remains and stonetools in McCorriston's Archaebotany Laboratory, while in theInstitute for Rock Magnetism Dr. Subir Banerjee and postdoctoralfellow Dr. Pieter Vlag are supervising magnetism measurements. Datesfrom radioactive carbon isotopes, amino acid racemization, andoptical hermoluminesce will be processed elsewhere but will helpenormously in interpreting our unique discoveries.
Figure 5. Mapping an ancient shruj ofundetermined date in the mid-Wadi Sana.
RASA benefitted from the support andgenerosity of people too numerous to mention here, but the projectwould like to thank them and the General Organization of Antiquities,Museums and Manuscripts, AIYS, CANOXY-YEMEN, The University ofMinnesota, the National Science Foundation, and many individual staffof these organizations.
Figure 6. Disused check dam ofundetermined date in a tributary to the mid-Wadi Sana.
