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Bronze Age Burial Mounds on Bahrain*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

Anthony Lowe
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Extract

The island of Bahrain has this century been notable for two main reasons: its identification as Dilmun (Telmun), known from Sumerian to Neo-Assyrian times, and the striking presence of thousands of burial mounds (a recent estimate is 172,000—Larsen 1983). Both have been the cause of some disagreement and difference of interpretation. Recent archaeological work has made the issue of the mounds, their place and interpretation, somewhat clearer. This is none too soon. Comparatively little effort has been made to elucidate the island's own internal archaeology. None of the numerous Bronze Age settlements on the island has been systematically excavated. Bahrain's archaeological framework, instead, is mostly based on the Danish Expedition's limited excavation of Qala'at al-Bahrain in the 1950s and 60s, which remains largely unpublished.

One of the results of this lack of settlement exploration and the inadequate publication of that already carried out is that the dating of the burial mounds, or at least those of Bronze Age date, has proved problematic, as has the whole of Bahrain's archaeological sequence. Recent work elaborating the ceramic chronology of the North Wall Sounding at Qala'at al-Bahrain by Larsen has been of considerable help. This has enabled broad guidelines to be established for the ceramic sequence from about 2300 B.C. to around 1700 B.C., the period to which the mounds date.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 48 , 1986 , pp. 73 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1986

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Footnotes

*

The following paper is the result of two seasons of field-work in Bahrain during which I worked for the Bahrain National Museum. I would like to thank the Director of Museums and Antiquities, Shaikha Haya Al-Khalifa, for giving me this opportunity. I would also like to thank Dr. Anthony Green for encouragement to write this article and Patricia Miller for her generous assistance in putting it together.

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