Page 15 - Life & Land Use on the Bahrain Islands (Curtis E Larsen)

Series Editors’ Foreword

Bahrain, although a small island, is of disproportional significance for the
archeology of the Near East. It played a critical role in commerce between
Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula, the Iranian Plateau, and even the distant
Indus civilization. The historical textual references to the trade emporium of
Dilmun are now widely believed to refer to Bahrain, and the field evidence supports
this interpretation. Curtis E. Larsen has marshalled the wealth of archeological
data gathered over a decade by the Danish Expedition, providing the most
comprehensive ceramic corpus and archeological evaluation yet attempted. For
these reasons alone this volume is of critical importance for Near Eastern
archeologists.
But Larsen has achieved more than a coherent synthesis of the prehistory
and history of the Bahrain Islands. He develops a land-use history based heavily on
personal data-gathering, followed by evaluation in terms of the principles of
economic geography. He examines the groundwater supplies of Bahrain, and their
response to sea-level fluctuations, so providing a key to artesian spring discharge
and changing water-heads over the past five millennia. He also critically reviews
the relevant record of Holocene rainfall variations as reflected in the lake basins
of adjacent Saudi Arabia. The result is a seasoned ecological assessment of the
periodicities in land-use expansion and contraction characterizing over 5000 years
of permanent settlement on the main island. The case is elegantly made, first
identifying and controlling the variables, and then showing how the history of land-
use and population density were largely a function of available water and distance
to fields from springs and settlements.
Larsen makes explicit but qualified use of the "island biogeographic
model," that is, a facsimile of a closed system, that allows simplification of a

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