Dr. Lloyd Weeks

And certainly when we look in this part of the world and we go back to a period where we call the last glacial maximum during the end of the Pleistocene period where things were at their coldest and driest about 20,000 years ago, sea levels were maybe 100 or 120 meters lower than they are now globally.

What is now the Persian Gulf was not a body of water.

It was a river valley and a series of wetlands which extended from what is now southern Iraq right to the Strait of Hormuz.

This river valley would have probably been quite an important environment and a place where people lived during that period between the last glacial maximum and the Holocene about 12,000 years ago when the climate improved and ameliorated and populations started taking off with the Neolithic revolution that took place in and around the Fertile Crescent.

So from about 15,000 years ago, this river valley started to fill in from the south, from the Strait of Hormuz, moving north through the millennia until it reached its highest state maybe about 6,000 years ago, where sea levels were a couple of meters higher than they are now.

But all of that potentially terrific late Pleistocene and very earliest Holocene archaeology is now under the drink, under the water, and very inaccessible.

I would say that we certainly see changes in settlement and we see settlements growing, but that we shouldn't take a model of the growth of cities that we might see in a place like southern Mesopotamia in Babylonia and transplant that to the Gulf because the growth of cities urbanization is something that didn't occur in all places of the Gulf during the Bronze Age.

Some places, yes, in Dilman that I'm sure Stefan will be talking about later on.

But in areas where I've worked, mostly in Southeastern Arabia, the modern day UAE and Sultanate of Oman, settlements become bigger, towns expand, but we don't see cities develop in the way that they do in Mesopotamia.

But certainly we're seeing a growth in populations and a growth in interconnectivity over very large distances.

I would say that there are quite big gaps in our evidence in lots of parts of the coastal Gulf.

Even in the northern Gulf, there are pockets of area like Falika Island, like Bahrain, and also the coast of Saudi Arabia adjacent to Bahrain, which show evidence for settlement.

And we've got evidence for settlement in Southeastern Arabia as well.

But there are gaps in between those settlements.

There are areas where we know very little in coastal parts of Saudi Arabia, for example.

Then there's the whole northern shore of the Gulf in modern-day Iran, where settlements of any period are very sparse in the immediately adjacent coastal region.

Once you get beyond the mountain chains further inland, we see the development of very complex and large sites and urban formations.

But on the coastal fringe itself, settlement's really limited to just a few locations.

Well, absolutely, because what's happening in Southeastern Arabia, where I've mostly worked at this time period, is still intimately connected with what's happening in Dilman when Dilman takes over this role as middleman and lead

agent of exchange in the Gulf region.