Page 98 - Life & Land Use on the Bahrain Islands (Curtis E Larsen)

4. Land-Use Patterns

Inferences from Spatial Arrangement
Itie preceding discussion provides an historical basis for understanding past land
use patterns on Bahrain, however, it is also necessary to develop control over the
archeological ceramic sequences to recapitulate the physical evidence of land use
on the islands. Without this archeological background, the complex overlay of
abandoned irrigation systems and potentially related village sites covering much of
the main island remains an imprecise imprint of past conditions. The ceramic
analysis provided in Appendix I furnishes a tool for the temporal separation of the
various archeological sites shown in Figure 7 and subsequent arrangement of these
sites in a series of images showing the array of the various occupation areas
throughout the past 6000 years.
Figure 10, for example, shows occupation sites on Bahrain related to the
Late Neolithic and Early Protohistoric time range (ca. 5000 to 3500 B.C.).
Combined here are sites which have been described as undifferentiated flint sites,
those with Group D flint assemblages, and 'Ubaid sites. While this time range is
the least understood for Bahrain, the one excavated site furnishes insight into the
paleoeconomy of this period and provides an association between Group D flint
assemblages and TUbaid pottery. Much of our knowledge, however, must be
inferred from imprecisely defined data.
Recognizable TJbaid pottery has been found at only two of these sites, 117
and 167, at both the northern and southern extremes of the zone of occupation.
TTie pottery has been identified as Late fUbaid by Joan Oates (Roaf 1976, Oates
1975) and is thus far the only published ’Ubaid ceramic evidence from Bahrain. A

third potential TJbaid site, 184, has been described by McNicoll and Roaf (n.d.)
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