Page 116 - Life & Land Use on the Bahrain Islands (Curtis E Larsen)

1

-92-

abandonment is clearly not a phenomenon characteristic only to the modern period.
Rather, our record shows continuous settlement along the north coast of the island
where the most copious artesian springs are located. Population and the
concomitant areas of agricultural land use on the island spread outward from this
artesian center and for still obscure reasons showed periodic retreat.
For ease of interpretation, Figure 16 shows the time range for each
archeological site as a function of distance from the north coast of the island.
Upon first examination, four prominent peaks in the extent of settlement and
related land use are evident. These are separated by three periods when
settlement contracted to only a core of occupation along the north coast of the
island. Thus, peak settlement and land use occurred during the Late *Ubaid
interval, the Barbar period, the first millennium B.C., and finally the medieval
Islamic period. Neo-Assyrian through Early Parthian expansion was less extensive
than the others. Settlement during this time covered only one third the area of
earlier and later periods of expansion. Notwithstanding the sometimes
fragmentary data available for interpretation, these four peaks are real expressions
of settlement and land use changes based on ceramic dating of occupation sites and
burials. While there is evidence for a continuous occupation of Bahrain over the
past 6000 years, the land used during this time was not constant. Settlement and
land use patterns changed episodically with respect to a center of constant water
flow and fertility.

A Land Use Model

An appraisal of Bahrain's past land-use patterns begins with the definition of
fundamental and basic concepts for the distribution of discrete and specialized
land-use zones. Tliese were originally described in a simplified theoretical manner
by von 'Hiunen (1875) and presented as his model of land use for an isolated state.
TTie original model defined concentric zones of specialized land use centered
around a hypothetical urban center. These ranged from very narrow zones of
intensively farmed lands near a central city outward through increasingly wider