Interactions and New Directions in Near Eastern Archaeology is the third volume of the Proceedings of the 5th Broadening Horizons International Conference that was held at the University of Udine from 5th to 8th June 2017. Broadening Horizons aims to be an international platform for postgraduate students and early-career researchers in the wide Near Eastern archaeology field. The main topic of the conference Civilizations in Contact served to emphasize the importance of cross-cultural interactions in the Near East over time. In particular, the present volume is devoted to the papers from Session 7, “Civilizations in contact: current research and new approaches in Mediterranean and Near Eastern Archaeology”, and Session 6, “Marine connections: the Gulf and the interactions between the Arabian Peninsula, Mesopotamia, the Iranian world and beyond”. The volume contains 24 peer-reviewed papers divided into two parts, introduced by the two key-lectures which were given by Elena Rova and Maurizio Cattani. These proceedings give a vivid picture of the exchanges and interactions that occurred during the presentation and debate of specialist papers in Udine at the conference. The diversity in terms of geographical environments, historical periods, and topics in Near Eastern archaeology stands out among the contributions published here. This collection of papers by a new generation of young scholars offers fresh and novel approaches to complex archaeological topics.

Costanza Coppini is a White-Levy fellow at the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology at the Freie Universität Berlin, leading a project about the Middle and Late Bronze Age pottery and settlements in Northern Mesopotamia. She is a member of the Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project (LoNAP), where she is in charge of the study and publication of second millennium pottery and takes part in the excavation at Gir-e Gomel (KIGAP). Her primary research field concerns the archaeology of the ancient Near East with a specialization in second millennium BC pottery and settlements. In relation to this topic she is involved in the study and publication of the pottery from the excavations at Tell Barri (Missione Archeologica Italiana a Tell Barri, Siria) and Tell Fekheriye (Institute of Near Eastern Archaeology, Freie Universität Berlin). She currently collaborates with other archaeological projects in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and has been involved in excavation projects in Italy and Syria. Besides these she participates in projects dealing with cultural heritage preservation.

Francesca Simi is a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Oxford. She works for the Endangered Archaeology in Middle East and North Africa project (EAMENA) at Oxford and is a senior member of the Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project (LoNAP). Her primary research field lies in the archaeology of the ancient Near East with a specialization in landscape archaeology. Her interests focus on the reconstruction of long-term population and land-use dynamics in Upper Mesopotamia by means of field survey, remote sensing techniques and GIS methods. She has been involved in several survey and excavation projects in Italy, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq. In the Kurdistan Region of Iraq – KRG, she directed the Tell Gomel Archaeological Survey (TGAS).

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 27

The Ubaid in the Gulf: compositional analysis of ceramic material (sixth‑fifth millennium BC)
(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2020)
Preston, Eleanor Lucy
Maritime trade in the Persian Gulf has been a pivotal feature of world trading systems from the Bronze Age to the present. Understanding its origins in prehistory is essential for any broader interpretation of early social and economic developments between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. The key period in this respect is the Mid-Late sixth millennium BC, when material culture of Mesopotamian origin is first documented in the Gulf. The material remains are in the form of potsherds from the southern Mesopotamian Ubaid tradition, which have been found as far as the Straits of Hormuz, 900 km from Iraq. Chemical analysis, conducted on the Ubaid-ware found in Arabia, determined that these potsherds originated from southern Mesopotamia and were not local imitations. These Ubaid-ware sherds, alongside a coarse-ware, believed to be local, are the earliest ceramic material found in Arabia. However, after the Ubaid period came to an end by the end of the fifth millennium BC, ceramic artefacts are not seen again in Arabia for nearly a millennium. Therefore this early appearance of ceramics in the Gulf region takes on a central role in approaching the wider questions of cross-cultural interaction. However, questions concerning provenance remain. This paper details ICP-AES analysis conducted on both the Ubaid-ware and the local ware with the aim of furthering our understanding of the exchange relationship between Mesopotamia and Arabia and putting the Ubaid within the context of the Arabian Neolithic nomadic population.
158 175
Christianity in the Gulf: vestiges of the East Syrian presence in late antiquity
(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2020)
Nicosia, Mara
The Arabian-Persian Gulf area has been fertile soil for different civilisations through the centuries, and bears the traces of numerous settlements of many different historical periods. Specifically, the area known in the past as Bēt Qaṭrāyē shows the vestiges of the Christian Syrian presence. The coastal region stretching from Kuwait to the United Arab Emirates, including also some of the Persian islands, displays a strange unevenness between the literary sources and the archaeological data relating to the history of the Christian communities that lived there between the fourth and the ninth centuries. The main texts naming the area, specifically its upper clergy and its most important religious circumstances, are the acts of the councils, but there are also other mentions scattered in different sixth and seventh centuries authors’ texts. Following the path of the ups and downs of the Church of the East, this paper aims at reconstructing a hypothetical history of the dioceses and the settlements in the area that witnessed the Christian presence. Anyway, this history cannot be understood only by relying upon written sources, and needs then to be integrated with the archaeological reports produced during the last decades. The result of this integration is the picture of a highly lively community, strong and self-reliant, whose history was too often forgotten.
145 169
Rescue archaeology in the sultanate of Oman: methods and solution strategies
(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2020)
Putzolu, Cristiano
;
Baione, Carlo
;
Cocca, Enzo
;
Laurenza, Sabatino
This paper aims at presenting the results of the topographic fieldwork of a team of professional archaeologists invited by the Ministry of Heritage and Culture of the Sultanate of Oman to excavate and survey three graveyards in the area of Sohar (Falaji as Souq, Wadi al Arad and Liwa) in 2014 and 2015. The construction of the Batinah Express Highway would have led to the destruction of hundreds of burial mounds, therefore the team developed a quick and accurate surveying strategy to document them properly: after a first “test” campaign using monoscopic photogrammetry, the team opted for 3D SfM photogrammetry using a completely open source workflow. This workflow required two surveyors on the field and in the IT lab to ensure the archaeologists updated orthophotos and to update the 2D and 3D vector plans. To manage the huge mass of data coming from the field the team opted for QGIS and the plugin PyArchInit. The mix of surveying methodology and managing system developed on site allowed the team to document the numerous Stratigraphic Units produced during the excavation of hundreds of graves, and also proved to be very helpful as hermeneutic tool as shown in the case of the excavation of Grave 21.
234 93
A transitional model between Umm An-Nar and Hafit cultures: the case study of Grave 4of Al Arid
(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2020)
Ghiro, Massimiliano
;
Cocca, Enzo
;
Laurenza, Sabatino
This paper presents the case study of a third millennium BC grave in Al-Arid, Ibri, Oman. The excavation and the analysis of the grave have been carried out during the archaeological rescue excavation project, directed by Dr. Sabatino Laurenza for the Ministry of Heritage and Culture of Oman, related to the works for the duplication of the road between Ibri and Yanqul, in Northern Oman. Controversial and interesting is the dating of the tomb: the structure is close to Umm an-Nar type (2600‑2000 BC), while the only element found inside it is a biconical small jar ascribable to Jemdet Nasr, Mesopotamian culture (3100-2900 BC). While the contacts between Jemdet Nasr culture and Hafit culture (3200-2800 BC) are already well known, our case study seems to represent a transitional moment between Hafit and Umm an-Nar cultures. Extremely interesting, at the same time, is the presence of skeletal remains only inside of the biconical small jar, while funeral chambers are completely empty.
161 70
Graves, distribution and social memory: towards a new definition of funerary landscapein Oman
(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2020)
Laurenza, Sabatino
;
Bianchi, Marco
;
Di Michele, Antonio
From 2014 Italian team, directed by Sabatino Laurenza, worked in the Sultanate of Oman for rescue archaeological excavations for roads construction. The excavations on the Batinah Expressway alignment in Sohar area touched three graveyards with different typologies of graves and with materials of different periods (from Bronze age to Sasanian and early Islamic). The results pushed us to apply a new approach to the “funerary landscape” study of the region. In this paper we present the “funerary landscape” as a specific type of archaeological landscape, focusing on a “mapscape” of the funerary sites and a detailed account of graves typologies and funerary finds (burialscape) and the relations between burials, disposal of the graves in the environment (funeraryscape) and the social memory of the group participating in the remembrance of the burial, through a series of standardized uses (i.e. graves organized in large groups over wide area, the repeated disposal of the dead in the same place, etc.). Those and other aspects let the area to become a place of remembrance of persons in a community’s social memory, reflecting the subscription of several communities to a similar set of guiding principles for creating and maintaining social memory.
143 113

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