Page 307 - Life & Land Use on the Bahrain Islands (Curtis E Larsen)

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Cooking Wares

Three prominent cooking wares are among the most common potsherds found on
Bahrain Islamic sites. The range of two of these, cooking wares with thickened
rims (fig. 67a, d, f, g), and those with everted rims (Figure 67c) are shown in Figure
55. The former are encountered throughout the medieval levels but continue on
into the overlying Portuguese and Safavid levels as well. Jars with everted rims
appeared in Levels A, B, and C. These cooking wares commonly made of a red
paste with prominent white grits. A noticable feature of the everted rim jars is a
red paint on the interior of the rim. This frequently extends a few centimeters
into the vessel.
The third cooking ware is a variation on bowl 67a. Examples are shown in
Figure 67b, g, and h. Each bowl has easily recognizable triangular lugs. The
earlier forms 67g and h incorporate these lugs two to three centimeters below the
rims. Similar triangular lugs have been reported by Whitcomb from Oman in the
Middle Islamic period (Whitcomb 1975, fig. 101) and from Hofuf in the fourteenth-to
sixteenth-century range (Whitcomb 1978, Plate 5, no. 1). Only jar 67c appears to be
useful in separating Middle from Late Islamic assemblages. The other forms
occupy a twelfth- through sixteenth-century range.

Summary

Figure 55 provides a stratigraphic grouping for a generalized medieval Islamic
ceramic assemblage dating approximately from the twelfth through fourteenth
centuries. This is outlined between Levels D and G in the Profile Sounding. The
abundance of Late Sung dynasty celadons and local imitations of Chinese rim forms
attests to the importance of Far Eastern trade in the gulf at this time.
Strikingly, there are no continuous ceramic parallels between Bahrain and
Hofuf. Whitcomb, in his analysis of the Hofuf collections, relied on the
stratigraphic sequence presented here for control. He notes that there are several
parallels between the Hofuf Middle Islamic assemblage and Levels D through H in
Figure 55. No parallels were found between Hofuf and those Middle Islamic forms