Christopher Thornton | Reflections, 10 Years at Bat in the Sultanate of Oman

[Applause] well thank you so much for coming I'm thrilled to be here and I of course I should thank Chris and the mat and the staff here at DOI for inviting me and for making me feel quite so welcome we had a wonderful dinner just before this and I you know I've been coming to the oh I now for almost 20 years and my first visit I was invited by Gil Stein who was then the director because I had written him an email and I said I'm very interested in world-systems theory and I'd like to talk to you about its relevancy to the economic development of Bronze Age societies in the Middle East I was a very serious student at once upon a time but Gil was wonderful and and invited me into his director's office and I was a quivering you know twenty-something whatever 20 year old and he spent a good hour with me and I'll never forget that because you know I'm sure Chris you do the same with students who just show promise and interests and maybe are slightly annoying and you say okay fine come in and and let's talk but anyway so the OU izo has been a special place for me and this is my first time lecturing here so I'm thrilled you're all here to witness my downfall so many of you may have come because you saw National Geographic and you thought oh that's interesting and some of you have come because you said where's Oman and you want to learn more about that so I do wear two hats literally and figuratively and my role National Geographic I'm happy to tell you more about at the reception afterwards if you're interested it's a very very complicated place both nonprofit and for-profit and I roam around multiple sides of those of that institution but today I wanted to talk about my research which I don't often get to talk about so it's kind of thrilling for me I've been working in Oman now since 2007 there's very few archaeological teams working in Oman so it was very easy to quickly become the expert and the emani's are really wonderful bull and don't have a lot of capacity and country so by simply offering to help it quickly became really close collaborators I'm a lot of the heritage issues that Oman is facing today with development and other things and I was just there about a month ago and it's just a great place I recommend it to all of you and hopefully after this talk you'll be inspired so where is Oman we're in southeastern Arabia I usually tell people Oman is east of Dubai and then they all go oh yeah I know where that is Oman is a surprising place it's a very mountainous country through most of the North has an enormous coastline beautiful beaches a very unusual culture today unlike its neighbors it has a different type of Islam called Abad ISM which we can talk about later but a very very unique culture linguistically religiously culturally and I always highly recommend it now in the Bronze Age particularly in the third millennium BC this is kind of what the world looked like right this was this was the world system has Gil would have said many years ago and you have here Mesopotamia of course in Iraq and these place names headed to the south and east come from Mesopotamian texts of the third millennium that talk about trading partners sometimes other nations they went to battle with and this sort of thing a lot of that is just hype but basically they talk about these places and for a long time scholars trying to figure out okay where are these places and who are they talking about and how do we match that with the archaeology here's for the classic example that everyone points to and this is from Sargon the great talking about the ships from dilma and the ships from Naga and the ships from Aloha and how he made them forced them to come to his port I'm sure they really twisted their arm to come trade with the Mesopotamians but it's interesting that one of the ways that they figured out where these places were is that they were always in that order right so they always went Dolman first then McGann and then Malou hyung and today most scholars acknowledge Dillman as the area of crane and that part of the Saudi coastline there may be a bit of Qatar McGann is the Emirates and Northern Oman and malukas will be now called the Indus Valley Civilisation and most scholars accept that as truth dil moon we know actually quite a bit about there's a lot of texts about Telman or dill moon both religious texts mythical texts it was the Garden of Eden right for the Sumerians and the acadians was sort of the place where life began it was a holy place it was also a trading partner and it was a very important trading partner for thousands of years sort of the main entrepot controlling the sea trade as it went up and to southern Iraq from the Gulf so you know decades and decades of excavation at in Bahrain in particular really unveiled the early purling culture there that pearls were obviously a very important part but the most important thing in Bahrain was actually fresh water so it's it's a natural source of fresh water in the region which is of course they had these fresh water owaisi's springing out of the desert very romantic and of course that's where this sort of concept of the beginnings of life and all of this holy waters came from my god is not so clear and there's a number of historical reasons for this the key one being of course McGann was closed to foreigners until the 1970s with the the current sultan overthrew his father and a bloodless coup with the help of the british and opened the doors for the first time and this was a medieval you know fiefdom nation I mean people still living the way they had lived in the 16th and 17th century suddenly thrown into the late 20th century and and there's a whole lecture I could give about the sort of rapid globalization and modernization of omens from the 70s to now it's it's really really dramatic and as an anthropologist it's fascinating but in the Bronze Age we didn't really know much about it even to the when I got there in 2007 despite decades since the 1970s of people working there nobody could actually point to where is McGann they would just say well it's the Emirates and Oman the Bronze Age you know the sort of thing I said well it was at a coastal nation they talk about the ships of McGann was this really a coastal thing oh yeah definitely coastal definitely coastal so anyway a friend and I went romp the ground on the back of the jeep Bob Adams style and just went looking for sites that had Bronze Age monuments and that's what we plotted there and you'll notice that there are very few on the coast right and the big uns are all in that interior part and so one of the first things that we did as part of the project was to say well if you're gonna say where are the large centers of ancient McGann they're not on the coast they're in the interior and those mountains that you can sort of see the topography are very high these are very high mountains they have snow in the winter in the summer can be like 55 degrees centigrade which is like 120 degrees Fahrenheit or something observed is an incredibly hot part of the world and yet the mountains are so high they can have snow so this was an area that the center of McGann was really hidden behind the mountains if you want to think about it that way now historically that's also interesting thinking about geography National Geographic I have to go there thinking about geography in historical times these were the trade routes that were known to go through the mountain passes between the coast and the interior bringing dried fish and other seafood products into the interior and exchanging them for dates for pastoral things like sheep and goat and that kind of stuff crops generally which were grown on the interior and these were the normal trade routes in historical periods well what's interesting is although we think about the Persian Gulf trade - Mesopotamia is very driven by the sea trade many experts in seafaring I am NOT one of them tell me that the Straits of Hormuz is not an easy place to take a ship it's actually very shallow it's very rocky the coastlines on both sides of the Straits of hormones have very little freshwater they're very inhospitable to life even today so if you're taking small bronze age vessels from let's say the Indus Valley Civilisation to Mesopotamia going through the Straits of Hormuz is not an easy task I'm sure it happened I'm sure it happened but it is also possible that McGann played an important role as an as a place of portage as a place where products would come to the Omani Coast maybe where it says so hard for example and they would portage across the land it's actually not that today you can drive that about two three hours it's not that that far and it's very flat and pretty easy to the other side and to get into other boats to take up to Mesopotamia it's possible this is all stuff to be worked out so why was McGann important other than as a place of portals well we know from the text that certain products were coming from McGann one of them is diorite so that statue there it's a very hard black stone diorite is found in Oman in the mountains soft stone vessels so what we traditionally call soapstone or chlorides do you type any of those large sources of soapstone are found in Oman but the most important product was this does anyone know what that is looks like a cow patty I mean it's not a cow patty they did not explore dung that's a copper ingot it's called a bun shaped ingot the copper of McGann was the most important product of this area according to text and we have lots of archaeological evidence that significant amount of copper production was being done this was the Pittsburgh of the Bronze Age world right the third millennium in the second millennium so after this early Bronze Age system so there shuts down I'm sure many of you know that the collapse and it's not really close but anyway at the end of the third millennium does anyone know where the the major copper center becomes Mediterranean Cyprus right and then the Ox hiding gets right that all kicks off in sort of the early to mid second millennium when Oman stops producing huge amounts of bun shaping which are found all over the known world so it's an interesting thing you see this shift to Mediterranean and you see Mesopotamia itself shift westward at that time so it's a you know I'm not saying copper rules the world but coupl rules the world so anyway in Oman we find lots of evidence of production of these buns shaped ingots which were being sold down the line to make these beautiful products like you know the bowl head of ore and you know these sorts of things these bronzes and copper artifacts almost all of that copper at this time was coming from either small deposits small production centers in Iran Turkey or the large mass production that's going on in Oman at that time and it's a scale issue so let me situate you okay so many of you probably familiar with Mesopotamia and the sort of standard sequence it's you you know you have the Neolithic arises you know twelve thousand years ago ten thousand years ago farming sheep sheep herding you know goats these sorts of things and then they start developing complex cities and civilization you get irrigation mass irrigation leads to bigger cities and then you get rioting and you get all of this wonderful stuff that you all know from the oh I go walk through the galleries and you'll see it right that is the sequence that we think of for the ancient Near East and we tend to use Mesopotamia as that sort of guiding light Oman doesn't do that at all what we have in Oman is basically a hunter-gatherer / pastoral lifestyle very limited pastoralism all the way until about 3000 BC so about 5000 years ago when Mesopotamia is in full throttle with cities and rioting governments and Egypt is becoming you know the pre-dynastic is kicking off and you're gonna go off into the dynastic and build massive pyramids suddenly at about 3000 BC almost overnight you see this shift and suddenly they're living in small villages in Oman with farming sheep goat wheat barley dates and they're settled and they're building monuments now they're not the Giza pyramids or the ziggurats but there are monuments and that's what we're going to talk about and then they go through the third millennium they're very wealthy because of this copper production that died right the soapstone and they go into the second millennium BC and what's here called the wadi soup period and there's some kind of collapse whenever even the whole system breaks down they also break down although new evidence is showing that that's of course not true and we can talk about that later over drink all right I'm zooming through a decade so you got to bear with me here I'm trying to speed it up okay so here's where we are here's the side of that that is one of the largest centres of the third millennium in this region it's both in square kilometers but also in its remains it has more it's a part of its a UNESCO World Heritage Site because it has more standing monuments from the 3rd millennium BC than any other site in all of southeastern Arabia I actually think it has more monuments of the Bronze Age than all the other sites combined of one period where I'll show you some pictures for example here these tombs you see on the left the ones on the bottom have been partially reconstructed the ones at the top have not so we find these open tombs still standing today they've not been touched they've not been reconstructed the ones at the bottom they did some silly stuff on them but anyway they're still standing and there are over 500 of them at that alone some of the leaf preserved ones we have thousands thousands and thousands this is a major major center certainly for constructing tombs but we also have what are called towers and that's what we're going to talk about today these monumental towers you see on the right they're all they're found throughout ancient mcgann they're generally round there are 20 to 25 meters in diameter somewhere between you know 50 and 60 feet in diameter there tend to be made of monumental stone they're very enigmatic obviously we have no writing in ancient mcgann so we don't know what they were for exactly all of them have a well in the middle you'd think well protecting water sources wonderful yeah well they have wells on the outside of them too amongst the domestic houses which is generally built right up against the tower so we now generally think of them as platforms we think there were platforms on which either religious structures sort of elite structures they can elite house or potentially some kind of fortification was built on top of them and unfortunately whatever was built on top has been wiped away years ago but these these large monuments are interesting because nobody had ever really investigated them before so people since the 1970s working in Oman and many you know esteemed names in Near Eastern archaeology fled to Oman when the revolution happened in Iran and they get kicked out of Afghanistan and Pakistan all these places and they fled to Oman because it was easy it was pleasant there was no war the Oman E's are lovely people they're very welcoming so people came here and they spent the rest of their careers here and what they did is they dug tombs and so they would excavate these tombs like you see at the top left because of course in the tombs they find all the fun things right you know tombs or where the goodies are and these are standing tombs so you don't even have to dig down right it's pretty easy you just have to kind of clear them out unfortunately they're multiple use tombs so many of these tombs have 50 60 70 burials associated with them some of them have hundreds of burials associated with them that can span hundreds of years so what ended up happening to the archaeology of the region is that we would define the periods define the archaeology based on the tomb types so we had three periods each one lasted at least 500 years and they were entirely homogeneous now if you know anything about archaeology you know that that's not possible people don't live in a modulus way for five hundred years without changing and so it was I was a problem in the archaeology of Oman that if you came to me and you said here I found this potsherd can you tell me when it's from I could say well it's somewhere between two thousand eight hundred and two thousand BC well that's a very long time in the third millennium if we were in the Paleolithic that would be brilliant but it's not and so it was very unhelpful it was very hard to pull connections with other cultures and other other civilizations so what we did in 2007 as we were invited to come to bat to their prized World Heritage Site and start excavating some of the some of these towers and the reason we went to the towers is because we were hoping for stratigraphy right we were hoping to find a sequence of building and construction but also a material culture really basic stuff all of you know archaeology know this so we started digging well I didn't dig I was important so I got to stand there and make them dig but we we started digging and it proved to be way more interesting than we had thought so bad itself has about eight towers and over six year period we excavated four of them the first thing we found out is they were not all contemporary so the towers were built and they were used for probably about a hundred hundred and fifty years and then they were abandoned in some cases they were actually kind of torn down to build a tower nearby boom and what that did was it was great so again talking about sequence once we got radiocarbon dates and material culture and we could say wait a minute this tower only dates to 3,000 to 20 and 100 BC for the first time in Omani archaeology ever we were able to say this pottery is from this early period and that was everything for us a really big deal and really helped us out we also learned a lot about their construction they were constructed often in multiple phases in some cases they were associated with water and irrigation in some cases they were high up on sort of a defensive pinnacle they were built on rock overlooking the valley and interesting thinking about those wells they still had wells in the middle of them that were dug into rock there was no water so again thinking about these wells that maybe they were ritual or some kind maybe they were for putting deposits in if they're up on a hillside maybe it's a cistern for collecting water we actually have one of the towers we excavated when we got to the outside of the tower we started seeing that there were these there was a ditch clearly dug around and again we're on top of a Hills of a rocky hillside right this knows there's no alluvium or anything so there's this this beautiful sandy ditch going around it with steps and so we go down a step and you're like okay and then you continue around the tower round tower and there's another step that we went through three of these steps and at the bottom there was a cistern which head was lined with slabs of stone and plastered and everything else and we're looking at this and we're like what the heck I mean you know where's are they taking water from somewhere I mean where's all this coming from and later on we found out we had invited a geomorphology team so experts in floovio dynamics and sedimentation everything to come look at the site and they said well first of all all of the sediment up here is brought here by people there's no natural way the sediment got here so they brought it up secondly this thing that you're looking at is a cascade for when it rained the two or three times of the year the rain would hit the hillside trickle down into this cascade around the tower and end up in the cistern Wow so that was very different from what we thought we were gonna find it showed it a level of hydraulic engineering that we never expected this is a stateless society I should point out in the graves there's no evidence of an elite at all all of the graves are exactly the same everybody is buried with the same number of pots and the same amount of jewelry everything is the same the same right so it's very difficult to see any kind of state-level society and yet they're building huge monumental structures with very complex hydrology making this of course a very interesting case example for those of us who study the non-state societies of the Middle East and if you want to learn more you can read it it's very technical brace yourself but we're very proud we got it out just last year and as Chris mentioned we have another one that's on its way which is about the settlement work that I'll show you a little bit about so this really focuses on those monuments and believe it or not it is the first technical monograph ever published of a prehistoric site in Oman so we've sort of tried to set up our for what scholars should be doing in the region because publishing what you do is very important everybody here knows now the other surprising thing about the towers the reason people never dug the towers as they said well there's nothing in them they're very boring we should go dig the tombs cuz you find all the good stuff so we said well maybe we don't care so we're gonna go dig them anyway and we did find good stuff we found some wonderful Indus pottery which is only ever been found that places like mohenjo-daro and strangely we found one shirt of it some wonderful arrowheads this is oh sorry I love this one I was telling John Alden about this over dinner so this here is a sort of classic Mesopotamian gem that Nasser early dynastic one - sure dated around let's say 2,900 2,800 BC I actually used the oh I collection for this and one of the people who students who worked on the project royal Ghazala was a student here at University of Chicago and he has these shirts here in Chicago so anyway this is a sort of typical Mesopotamian import that was not a huge surprise what was the surprise was this little guy this is exactly the same shape it looked the same so when you look at it it's got the same green a greenish buff they usually call it it's kind of this sort of pukey color that's actually a slip it's painted to look like this one right so it's painted to look like a Mesopotamian one this the shape is the same but it is completely a foot it's a local fabric it's this really terribly made ceramic typical sort of local imitation of a foreign import right what's exciting about it is it's actually the earliest evidence of ceramic production ever in Oman because the emani's didn't make pottery until about 2600 BC in traditional textbooks if you ever look at their money archeology and this is dated 2900 and it is clearly local when you look at it as a ceramicist so that was very exciting that's very pouring a technical I'll tell you this story because it's a little bit more fun this was found in a hoard of beads that were mainly Iron Age beads that's a new kingdom scarab seal you can't see it now what is a new kingdom scarab seal doing in Omaha right and it was found in this hoard of irony beads in an Islamic context on top of one of the towers and our assumption is that these were looted from a Iron Age tomb somewhere in the vicinity and stored probably under somebody's house or something like that and forgotten about they found all sort of together but anyway we were very excited I mean how many times do you find a new Kingdom scarab seal when you're working in Oman so we went to the ministry at the end of the season bringing all of our finds and we had it in this beautiful little you know glass case and we were so excited and we did the whole like whip it out from behind your back to say look what we found and they said oh what is it and we said here look at it it's a new Kingdom scarab seal from Egypt and the guy looked and he goes oh yeah I have a whole drawer full of those and it gets me bowls open the drawer and I've got like seven of them you know I was like where do those come from so you know tombs and around and around and I'm just like those are Egyptian and he goes yeah okay anyway we made them promise to put them on display so if you go to Muscat of new National Museum there's a little case with all the scarab seals including that one but anyway goes to show don't get too cocky right so another thing that we did that I'm very proud of so we excavated this tower you can see the internal walling you could see the well these massive walls that's one wall so five meters in diameter going around these look like rooms they're not rooms there's no doorways there's no floors there's nothing in them the end you see out here you start getting the beginning of houses and other structures which is a whole nother lecture but what we wanted to do was we wanted to find a place where we could go down right remember I mentioned we were looking for stratigraphy we wanted to see the layers on top of each other which we could date and get material culture to really establish a sequence for Oman in the third millennium and so we went here and and we decided to open up what's called a deep-sounding right where you just open up one area and just go down until you hit China so the reason we went here in the the site was originally excavated in the 70s and 80s by a Danish archaeologist named Karen free-fell who believe it or not I still alive today she's 102 or 101 bless her heart and she excavated just a very limited Santosh only about a meter or two wide and like 25 meters long coming from the inside of the tower all the way outside she just wanted to see what was there and this is the section that she published which you know shows all of her layers in blah blah blah but what struck me when I looked at this section so here's the tower wall the tower today is surrounded by alluvium which to most people that doesn't seem like a weird thing except if you know Oman it rains two times of the year there is no eluvian what aloo VA ssin right there's no rivers so where is this amount of eluvian coming from right question number what question number two for me is okay so here's the tower wall right that's the scale so that's a meter so this is like almost three meters high and we're digging down 2 meters into the into the soil here there's the bottom of the tower what the heck is that right so that's that excited me so I said okay well we're gonna go and we're gonna see what we can find and sure enough we open up the deep-sounding and we go down and you find you know walls here I'll make it easier for you okay no why is that exciting the tower dates as I said to the bronze aged this middle of the third millennium BC typical of many of the towers the earliest period like I mentioned of settled farming happened as I said almost overnight around 3000 BC right like almost overnight bang farming sheep goat wheat barley dates etc we had never found a settlement of that period only tombs the only settlement that ever been found was one tower in actually in the Emirates the site called hilly and a French team had excavated there and they had found the wheat in the barley and the sheep in the goat and they didn't really have houses they just had this one tower that they had excavated and that's what we knew about this period about this earliest farming villages these earliest settlements and so here underneath the we're about three meters down we managed to find one well that's super helpful so we we in in seasons that followed we've tried to find more of it it is buried under about three meters of very clay heavy alluvion which is not fun to dig if you've ever tried and then many of the walls are mud brick and so they're a very clay mud brick with no chaff in a clay matrix of clay so that is something for future technologies to try to help but it was exciting for us because for the first time we could prove these were not sort of nomadic hunter-gatherers these were settled society has been as had been argued but never proven so because of that alleviation I mentioned we invited that geomorphology team right so we invited the team of specializes in fluvial dynamics and sedimentation and all that good stuff geophysical geography is another way to say that and so here they are studying one of the sections now that's a natural section in the sense that it's a sort of natural illumination but of course there is archaeological material in it this is a natural road cut by the way which is what of course made it a beautiful section because you just have to clean it up here you see these are mud bricks that is from that earliest village period so that was very exciting is that we found it again in the section this is about a hundred metres from that Tower so we were pretty confident that that whole landscape from the tower all the way to the hillside which you could see there was probably a village of that period and again hopefully technologies in the future will make it easier to access but what was also exciting here and I think I have some circles there you go there's the mud bricks what was that so exciting was here so what you're seeing here this white level that's a natural sort of lake bed from you know seven eight thousand years ago when you know it was still a very green lush area standing water hardly very marshy creating a sort of shallow lake and you get shale deposits and that kind of thing and they make it white clay wait so that's down here at the bottom and then you start getting these you see these stripes this is sort of tip as a lake or a marshes drying up you'll get periods of drying periods of wet and so then it's black and then it's white and that's all very natural and it shows the drying up which for them was very exciting the natural environmental changes that happen here but right at the top right before it switches to being this typical illumination we did some micro morphology which is you go and you take parts of the dirt and you look at it under a microscope you look for things like evidence of human occupation right little crushed bits of ceramic or charcoal or evidence of you know ploughing and that kind of thing and what we found is that if this is that earliest village we're about half a metre lower than that right at the cusp at the end of this natural striations and what we found was evidence of human controlled irrigation that is flooding episodes and this has to do with shells they found it's a whole complicated thing but I can tell you original but basically what it suggests is at about 3,500 3400 BC so in this gap period that we knew really nothing about it was an overnight that there was a period in which probably still fairly mobile pastoral groups are not quite farming yet there's no evidence that they were farming maybe they were but they're definitely controlling water and they're not controlling water to drink per se they're controlling water because of the most important thing that natural water brings which is what fertile soil right the Nile is not important because it's the source of freshwater the Nile is important because it's a source of fertile sediment for anyone has ever been to Egypt you know how dramatic the nile role plays in separating the desert from what you can live in right and it's the same in Oman so they were controlling water for sedimentation and that's a really interesting new growth area that a lot of different groups in Oman are now exploring because it suggested happened earlier than we had thought and before there was contact with Mesopotamia which is a critical thing because the argument had always been for some reason farmers from Mesopotamia decided to go and call an item on which I thought was a very strange thing for farmers to do but anyway so so this is some of the new growth stuff that we're looking into is be both the environmental changes and how humans adapted to those environmental changes through use of the landscape in new and innovative ways so having done monuments for about six years I still felt that we didn't really understand how who were these people how did they live what did they do we knew have we knew their tombs we knew their monuments we know a lot about their their you know health and biology from the skeletal samples but we really didn't know much about how they lived how they farmed who were they so I wanted to go find somewhere with settlement I really wanted houses I want to do a little domestic archaeology and I don't know if can any of you see the the walling in there you see some in the back pretty easily that's actually an Islamic thing but this here and if you could see that you know that this was an area that the Danish archaeologists very helpfully had called the settlement slope so we thought well let's go start there that should be good and sure enough it was and we were we were quite pleased that you could see it's quite shallow so we don't get a lot of deposit this is where I was mentioning by the way that's the tower that has the cascade around it in the cistern this is the hillside that when it rained our geomorphologist suggests that water came down here would hit this cascade and then hop around until it got on the cistern just showing you where we are so we're on top of a limestone low hill right we're up above whatever alluvion is happening so any sedimentation we have up here is if it's not brought in by the wind it's man-made right you know it's brought there by people and and this area here for example was this plot a very sandy sediment which rju morphologist again tell us was probably a garden so here you have a house entrances some interest is blocked up different phases of use with a little garden behind it right sort of beautiful domestic archeology we just found somebody's house and like any good house it's full of trash right and as you all know archeologists are waiters are your house is not full of trash sorry we archaeologists really are experts in trash that's what we do we take trash and we analyze that we understand it and we make a lot out of it and you know occasionally you get lucky this is what I call a big find from the houses this is a bronze sickle for farming you know and again this is not a golden idol right it's not even a new kingdom scarab seal but for us it's just really exciting nobody had ever dug houses in the Bronze Age right it was always tombs if it wasn't tombs you might dig a tower we didn't know anything about the houses we didn't know anything about their domestic life so this has been a really exciting new step for us a PhD student just finished at Johns Hopkins working on our project has written literally the first thesis on domestic archaeology in the Bronze Age of Oman mmm you know it's like light years behind everywhere else in the rest of the world in archaeology but we're catching up so we're very pleased to kind of push these boundaries a little bit another one of our PhD students Smitty Nathan just finished at NYU doing the first flotation for botanical samples ever done in the can we say this over and over again and you know for us this is really exciting right for the archaeologists the audience you know this you find a hearth with charcoal and seeds this is a big day right and so we we do our flotation and obviously this is not a Bronze Age site this is a 16th century village in Oman but this is also my plug go visit Oman it is gorgeous and it's not gonna stay this way forever so if you want to see the way people lived in the 17th century in Arabia this is this is it anyway this is gonna help us kind of reconstruct this is how I think about the settlement slope up on that rocky hillside with the eluvian down here obviously they weren't terraces in the Bronze Age but this kind of situation it really helps us to visualize how people lived and use their landscape over time and this is really important at that where in addition to the Bronze Age we actually have remains all the way up until the present so we've got Iron Age and we've got early historic and we've got medieval and we've got late Islamic and and you know this is the the modern well it's the historic village about the mud-brick village and it was constructed probably in the 16th 17th century when the Portuguese came and took over the coasts of Oman a lot of the Oh Lonnie's fled into the interior and built fortresses everywhere they went they were terrified the Portuguese were coming of course the Portuguese never bothered to go into the interior but just in case they did they built forts everywhere so you have these beautiful mud brick forts everywhere and they're beautifully preserved because as I said it rains 2 days a year right and not a lot so they're in really really good shape but they are crumbling to dust you know when the when the Sultan took over in the 1970s one of the first things he did is he decreed that all of his people would stop living in mud brick and the government set about building lots and lots of cement buildings and moving everybody in and and those of you worked in the Middle East no this is one of the great disasters of the Middle East because of course mud brick houses set in to date groves semi-subterranean are the coolest most wonderful places to be when it is 52 degrees Celsius outside right they are natural air-conditioning and they're wonderful and nowadays they live in cement or nowadays they live in marble mansions leather like smack in the middle of the desert no trees to be seen and they're just getting full Sun and so they're blasting their air conditioning you know 24/7 it is that you know a disaster of multiple levels but anyway so these they all of these sites were abandoned basically overnight so we've actually partnered with a team from the University of Leicester who are doing a combination of historical archaeology and ethnicity and talking to the people of that because many of them were born in the mud brick village right many of the people who are today in their 50 60 70 s they remember living in these little mud brick homes with their you know eight other siblings two camels three goats and a donkey and they all lived in a house together and mom used to cook there and we would sleep up on the roof here I mean you know that kind of information as you all know is so rare nowadays for historic structures so where we're able to do that now and work with them what's exciting also about this sort of ethnic history historical archaeology project is suddenly the town got interested so as soon as we started working not only on the prehistoric site which occasionally people would show up we would be like good what are you doing what are you looking at and you tell them they'd be like okay boring they walk away soon as we started working in the mud brick village and we started you know conducting interviews with the people to say please walk me through your village and tell me how you lived here and they loved it and of course we did it you know gender segregated right so the women on our team would go the women of the village in the morning and they would go walk through and they'd have a grand old time they'd be whooping it up and laughing and dancing I was that and then we men would go with the men it was very formal and everybody is walking and yes very pleasant and polite so anyway that goes to show you who actually has fun in the Middle East anyway so what was great is suddenly we had a lot of interest and so we realized that a lot of what we had to do was not focus so much on our research but to focus on our outreach right and I mean this is pretty obvious to many of you but emani's at least the almighty's that we dealt with we're never interested there's one Omani archeologist in the whole world one and he got his ph.d only about six years ago right they don't have a culture of interest in their own archaeology they're they they're not against it you know they're not like looting it or anything they're just like oh yeah there's some monuments you know that's cool yeah you know so so having seeing this interest we jumped at it right and so we brought in some educational specialists and heritage specialists and started working on how do we get them more involved and this really grew so we were we were already proud that we were one of the few truly international teams working in Oman so in Oman you have the French team and everybody on the French team is French and then you have the German team and everyone on the German team is trip and you got the published team and you got the best team in the British team in that team and then here comes the American team you've got you know poles Indians French Australians Koreans you know you name it we were like you want to come show it we had to University of Chicago students anyone to come could come no problem so it was open-door policy if you could get yourself there we would put you up right so we had these wonderfully diverse teams but what we also started to do once the OMA knees were becoming one better trained because they were working with us year after year after year they became more interested so Badr Ali was a farmer a date farmer he's illiterate he can't even really write his name in Arabic he uses a fingerprint and he became one of our absolute best excavators he was a really hard worker and of course he was a farmer so he knew the land he knew the soil and was really good at it and so we really started giving him more and more opportunities and now he is officially the site manager for bet he's the one with the keys and he protects the monuments at bat year-round Rahim Nasser was working with me his English was excellent so the complete opposite of Badr Ali she was totally literate in two languages a very very smart guy but also very good at archaeology and I wouldn't say he was interested and he was curious well any of you who teach students know that curious is better than not right so you seize upon curious and you try to find what are they interested in and what I believe it or not what he was interested in was paperwork so okay so we had an helping us out as a lab manager and doing you know helping with the inventory and all of that and he did a great job and he's now been hired by the ministry in Muscat and he worked officially in the ministry of heritage and culture and remember this is the provinces right I mean this is this is the villages right people in Muscat do not talk to these people generally speaking and he's now a rock star and the ministry was so proud and this is my co-director charlotte cable and she worked with the women in the village women of course cannot work in the field that would be culturally taboo but women in Oman are very empowered they are the dominant gender in universities in higher education they work in ministries they can be ministers the ambassador to the United States is a woman an Omani woman um so they're very empowered and Charlotte trained a number of these young ladies many of whom now work for the ministry as the heritage advisors in education outreach advisors and they write you know curricula in Arabic I know money Arabic which is a very specific thing and REITs do outreach to schools and that kind of thing so we're really really proud we got these people not only curious and then interested but also tried to help them get actual skills so they can get actual jobs right and that was a really big part of where we started moving with the project long story short you know for me the lesson the take-home was while the monuments were great and I learned a lot as soon as we started working on the houses and we started looking at how did people live and then we you know tried to look for historical analogies right to sort of sake well how can this help us understand the use of the landscape suddenly it you know this whole thing came alive and we know I feel have a really robust community at the old mines in particular who are really interested in what we're doing and when we go back there's great fanfare and excitement and they want to talk about oh I was digging in my garden and look what I found you know all this stuff which can be good or bad but one of the interesting things at a site like bad is a living site you know this is this is the view from here I'm showing you the modern village right this is a living site with living heritage and partly the most exciting part of this project is obviously there's a lot more to do there's old periods so we have our work cut out for us probably I will not be doing it being an administrator nowadays a middle manager the the gruesome middle manager at National Geographic but we've trained an army of PhD students and emani's and very proud that I think some of them are gonna go on and take over this project and I'll just show up and drink my gin and tonics the way I should be so with that thank you all for coming and I'll take a few questions you you

Channel: The Oriental Institute

Views: 9,726

Rating: 4.8421054 out of 5

Keywords: Bat, National Geographic, Christopher Thornton, Oman, Arabia, World Herritage Site

Id: dWgJF6DSuac

Length: 46min 38sec (2798 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 28 2017