Marta Luciani
is Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology and History at the Institute of Near Eastern Studies, University of Vienna.
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The Archaeology of North Arabia: Oases and Landscapes provides us with the proceedings of the namesake international congress organised at the University of Vienna. Its rich list of contributions both on recent results of field activities and new considerations on different settlement patterns and historical and cultural processes within North Arabia makes this volume a state-of-the-art account of the multiple scholarly pursuits in the region.
The innovative topics are connected both to field research and interpretative anthropological approaches: from the oasis formation paradigm, the debate on crops, on local types of agriculture and water management systems in different desert and oases landscapes, and on the date of appearance of date palm cultivation, to funerary and ceremonial landscapes in their transition and transformation from the Chalcolithic to the Bronze and Iron Ages; from the ground-breaking presence of Syro-Levantine metal weapons in early second millennium BCE graveyards of the Northern Hejaz, the phenomenon of large-scale diffusion of oases-produced pottery wares, the attestation of chariots on rock art, and the challenges of modern-day archaeology and cultural resource management, down to the concept of environmental differentiation and identity, between mobility and connectivity.
New data and the multi- and transdisciplinary methodology espoused by the volume dramatically change our understanding of the social and cultural development, especially of social complexity, of an area often neglected in scholarly studies in the past. These proceedings, therefore, contribute substantially in positioning the archaeology of North Arabia into the broader perspective of the archaeology of the Ancient Near East, from the Neolithic to the pre-Islamic period and will hopefully become a standard work for understanding the Arabian Peninsula for years to come.
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