Dr. Lloyd Weeks

But it's always culturally distinct from what's happening in the central Gulf, although they're deeply interconnected.

Well, that's right.

Some are in the desert, some are coastal, some are in different locations.

But yes, there's a very long tradition of the creation of substantial stone-built burial monuments in Southeastern Arabia that begins right at the start of the Bronze Age in what's called the Hafidh period, maybe 5,000 or 5,200 years ago.

And by the time we get into the Ummanah period, around 4,000 to 4,500 years ago,

This tradition of tomb building has changed and transformed into one in which they build large, circular, stone-built tombs, collective tombs, anywhere between about 5 and 15 meters in diameter and several meters high, sometimes with two stories.

And into these tombs went all members of the community.

And so some of the tombs we have evidence for 400, 500, even more people being buried inside in these large collective burials.

And on the outside, certainly as this technique of tomb production reaches its apogee at the end of the third millennium, we have very elaborately and smoothly carved blocks of stone, of pale white stone, limestone ashlars, which create a really incredible appearance for the exterior of these tombs as well.

Well, I guess a lot of Dilman's prominence comes from the fact that it's prominent in the Mesopotamian textual sources.

And, you know, once we push an extra several hundred kilometers further south in the Gulf, then we're really moving to and beyond the edge of the known world for most Mesopotamians.

And mentions of this part of the world are far fewer than we have for Dilman.

So our picture from those textual sources is much more scant.

But the archaeological evidence tells us that, of course, these societies, they lived in all different parts of the environment in southeastern Arabia, in the mountains, in the Piedmonts.

But they were also very populous in coastal areas.

And there were coastal settlements that we know in the Persian Gulf region and around the Strait of Hormuz, also in the Sea of Oman as well.

So yes, coastal resources were critical to these societies.

We've got evidence for lots of fishing and shellfish gathering through the Bronze Age with peaks and troughs in these kinds of practices.

And this existed alongside traditional agriculture, date palm agriculture, and the raising of domesticated sheep, goat, and cattle.

Go for it, Stefan.