Dr. Lloyd Weeks

It's interacting with Southeastern Arabia and some of those way stations that Stefan mentioned earlier heading north, they have similar counterparts, somewhat smaller maybe, heading south as well, which indicate Dilman Trade is heading to Southeastern Arabia to maintain this Gulf exchange system in a changed way from what it was in the third millennium.

Southeastern Arabian materials, especially copper, were still moving north through the Gulf at this time.

And some of my work has been around exploring the nature of this technology in Southeastern Arabia, but also some of the material as it's been exported to sites in Bahrain and also on Fylika, where I've looked at some of the metal artifacts from the excavations there by Stefan and other Danish teams.

And what we can see when we look at that material is that there really is a clear evidence for the use of Southeastern Arabian Magan copper in this period of the early second millennium BC.

And that is one thing that aligns perfectly with what we know textually about the continuation and even the expansion of the copper trade at this time.

Although in the place that's producing the copper in Southeastern Arabia, finding archaeological evidence for this production is quite challenging.

Dillman is really winning the picture in terms of the textual sources, but also the archaeological evidence for this time period.

I would say in this case, no oxide ingots in the Gulf.

We wish that would be very interesting.

What we've got more is what we might technically call plano-convex ingots, but regular people would call bun-shaped ingots, maybe about 10 or 15 centimeters in diameter, flat on the top, curved at the bottom, hence the name bun-shaped.

And these seem to be one of the most common forms in which copper was traded during the Bronze Age in the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC.

Occasionally, we find larger lumps of copper that might have slightly different shapes.

There's one from a site called Telebrac from the early second millennium BC that's almost pyramid-shaped, but mostly we're looking at bun-shaped ingots.

Well, what we see as we move into the Southern Gulf is a kind of a cultural transition.

So we move from the Central Gulf, which is fairly culturally homogeneous in terms of its material culture.

We might call this Dilman.

When we get into the South, we see different kinds of assemblages of material, whether it's ceramics or metal artifacts or soft stone vessels that are distinct from those that we find in Dilman, but that are relatively homogenous within this area of Southeastern Arabia, the UAE and Oman.

Typically, in the third millennium, we would call this the Umunna culture or the Umunna period.

And as we move into the second millennium, we give it different names, the Wadi Suq period and the Late Bronze Age.

And we see different levels of integration within this society.