Page 101 - Life & Land Use on the Bahrain Islands (Curtis E Larsen)

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Little is known of settlement or land use on Bahrain until the mid-third
millennium B.C. Only one potsherd, seemingly in mixed context, has been
associated with the late fourth millennium (Mortensen 1970a). This Jemdet Nasr
polychrome sherd from Temple I at Barbar is considered "out of place" in the
Temple I context, but may indicate a contemporary occupation of the north coast
of the island and trade links with Mesopotamia as early as 3000 B.C.
Unfortunately, no corroborative evidence has been recovered by either the
combined surface collections of the Danish and British expeditions or from my own
collections. A lack of Uruk through Early Dynastic ceramic evidence for late
fourth- and early third-millennium occupation is disturbing, considering that
ceramics of this time range have been reported from eastern Arabia (Adams et al.
1977, Golding 1974, C. Piesinger 1983). While an absence of similar evidence on
Bahrain may be due to an insufficient sample, the data suggest little more than a
possible protoliterate settlement somewhere on the north coast of Bahrain where
constant reuse of the same land area has obliterated most traces of the occupation.
In addition, this negative evidence suggests that settlement and land use during this
interval (ca. 3500-2500 B.C.) did not parallel the patterns for the Late TJbaid.
Because of the lack of evidence, it can only be surmised from knowledge
of the TJbaid, Uruk, and Early Dynastic subsistence strategies of both Arabia and
Mesopotamia that this intervening period on Bahrain was marked chiefly by
cultivation, fishing, and pastoralism. The further presence of Early Dynastic and
Uruk ceramics only a few kilometers away on the Arabian coast points to the
presence of a trade network involving the markets of southern Mesopotamia. A
similar history is probably warranted for Bahrain.
A different and more fully identifiable group of surface sites provides the
next index of settlement and land use. Here, the ceramic assemblages from
Qala'at al-Bahrain provide more certain control over the temporal range of surface
sites. A total of seventeen sites are recorded which show evidence of late third-
millennium and early second-millennium use (Figure 11). These range from
potential Akkadian period trade goods (a single sherd of black on gray, painted fine
ware related to Yahya IVB and Shahr-i-Sokhta n and HI found near site 79 along