Dr. Lloyd Weeks

We might see a lot of evidence talking to a particular kind of exchange relationship, but that's not really appearing on the ground.

And certainly a lot of the materials that are being discussed in texts,

what we might call invisibles in the archaeological record.

They don't necessarily stick around particularly well in the ground, things like textiles, which only survive in certain kinds of burial environments.

Although they seem important from the texts, when we work archaeologically, we're largely working in the absence of these sorts of organic remains.

Well, at the moment, some of those ships aren't going, which is part of the story about the Strait of Hormuz at the moment, I guess.

But in the Bronze Age, certainly, I mean, we can begin very early back before the Bronze Age and start to look at some very fragmentary archaeological evidence, which tells us about the importance and the nature of ships and shipping in the Gulf, even into the Cacolithic and further back into the Neolithic periods.

We find small fragments of bitumen, which show impressions on them, which tell us about the nature of the craft, which were being produced at that time, made of wood and potentially of reeds as well.

And we sometimes find models of ancient watercraft in various archaeological contexts in the Gulf and in southern Mesopotamia.

So already this maritime technology that was ratcheted up in the Bronze Age had a very long tradition in this part of the world where local communities, Mesopotamian communities, were using

transport over water for a variety of purposes to move people and to move goods.

As we move into the Bronze Age we get the feeling that the size of the vessels, the scale and the nature of the exchange are all increasing quite dramatically.

And although our archaeological evidence is still very fragmentary, it's at this kind of juncture where we can bring in evidence from Mesopotamian texts, the ones that Stefan was talking about earlier, which tell us about the scale and nature of the ships, the so-called big ships of Magan that were sailing up and down the Gulf at this period.

But I might throw to Stefan on that because that's really his area.

Please do.

Let's do it.

Yeah, that's right.

I guess one of the hardest things we have to do as archaeologists is go to a place and stand there and try and imagine it not looking like it does now.

And when we're dealing with sites that are maybe only a few hundred years old, the changes might not be so massive.

But when we're dealing with sites that are thousands of years old, then landscapes and environments can change pretty dramatically over those time periods.