The Red Sea, Coastal Landscapes, and Hominin Dispersals

This chapter provides a critical assessment of environment, landscape and resources in the Red Sea region over the past five million years in relation to archaeological evidence of hominin settlement, and of current hypotheses about the role of the region as a pathway or obstacle to population dispersals between Africa and Asia and the possible significance of coastal colonization. The discussion assesses the impact of factors such as topography and the distribution of resources on land and on the seacoast, taking account of geographical variation and changes in geology, sea levels and palaeoclimate. The merits of northern and southern routes of movement at either end of the Red Sea are compared. All the evidence indicates that there has been no land connection at the southern end since the beginning of the Pliocene period, but that short sea crossings would have been possible at lowest sea-level stands with little or no technical aids. More important than the possibilities of crossing the southern channel is the nature of the resources available in the adjacent coastal zones. There were many climatic episodes wetter than today, and during these periods water draining from the Arabian escarpment provided productive conditions for large mammals and human populations in coastal regions and eastwards into the desert. During drier episodes the coastal region would have provided important refugia both in upland areas and on the emerged shelves exposed by lowered sea level, especially in the southern sector and on both sides of the Red Sea. Marine resources may have offered an added advantage in coastal areas, but evidence for their exploitation is very limited, and their role has been over-exaggerated in hypotheses of coastal colonization

Stone Technology in Arabia

International audienc

Dispersals, connectivity and indigeneity in Arabian prehistory

Dispersals, connectivity and indigeneity in Arabian prehistor

Dispersals, connectivity and indigeneity in Arabian prehistory

Dispersals, connectivity and indigeneity in Arabian prehistor

The Khaybar Longue Durée Archaeological Project. Objectives and First Results

International audienc

The Khaybar Longue Durée Project. Objectives and first results

International audienceThe Khaybar oasis is a hotbed of local history in northwest Saudi Arabia. It has been preserved for millennia, and its human occupation seems to have been uninterrupted from earliest prehistoric times to the present day. The new Khaybar archaeological survey and excavation project (Khaybar from Prehistory to Modern Times - Archaeological reconstruction of an oasis over the longue durée [2020-2024]), supported by the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) and the French Agency for the Development of AlUla (AFALULA), began in October 2020 and will last until the end of 2024.This session at the Seminar for Arabian Studies is the first-ever opportunity to present the archaeology of this major oasis in the Arabian Peninsula. This lecture aims to introduce the objectives and methods of our project and to bring to light some preliminary results of our field survey inside the RCU oasis core zone at Khaybar. Furthermore, we will highlight major advances on prehistoric occupation, identification of specific patterns of local desert kites, the discovery of a long pre-Islamic rampart and of a new pre-Islamic site, as well as the significant amount of rock art and inscriptions

A quantitative approach to the study of Neolithic projectile points from south-eastern Arabia

Lithic projectile points always had an important diagnostic value for documenting the development and expansion of Arabian Neolithic material culture (c. eighth\u2013fourth millennium BC) and subsistence strategies due to the remarkable abundance of surface assemblages. Given the limitations of traditional arrowhead typology for analysing the increasing variability emerging from archaeological research in the region, we propose here a new systematic description of Neolithic projectile points, based on the consistent observation of technological and morphological change over time and space in a number of diagnostic parameters. A quantitative exploration of variation is carried out on both published and unpublished data through a number of pattern-recognition techniques and exploratory analyses such as principal component and cluster analysis. By presenting the first application of this approach to Arabian Neolithic projectile points, the research offers a valid tool for investigating temporal and cultural trends through different phases of the Neolithic in the region of interest

Reconstructing Migration Trajectories using ancient DNA

Revealing the temporal and geographic pattern of human and animal dispersal and migration has been a major goal within anthropology, archaeology, and palaeontology. Here, I focus on the use of ancient DNA to delve beneath the migration palimpsests. More specifically, I firstly describe the use of ancient DNA derived from archaeological pig remains as a proxy to understand the initial dispersal of farmers into Europe, the back migration into Anatolia, and the spread of people into the Pacific. I then show how ancient DNA from foxes in the northern and southern hemisphere has been used to understand their dispersal onto islands in the absence of landbridges. These case studies highlight the value of DNA derived from long-dead organisms to detail the pattern and process of ancient dispersals