Dr. Lloyd Weeks

Okay, so Shumel is a site that's in the Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah, in the very northern part of the UAE, very close to the Strait of Hormuz, as you mentioned, near the Musandam Peninsula.

And it's a Bronze Age site, which has evidence from multiple different periods, from the Ummanar period and in the second millennium from the Wadi Suq and the Late Bronze Ages.

And having occupation across all those periods makes it a rather rare site for that particular region.

But across that time period of a thousand years or more, the nature of the evidence changes very substantially.

In the Ummanar period, in the third millennium, we have a couple of very large Ummanar tombs that we know from Shimul, but we have really no idea of where people were living at that time.

We've got no evidence for the settlement of the people who were buried in those tombs.

We think that was in the area of the modern date palm gardens, which are all through the Northern Emirates in this location.

And the thing about date palm gardens is that the earth is constantly turned over as the gardens are renewed and the crops are renewed.

And so that destroys a lot of archaeological evidence in and around date palm gardens.

But this is a location where water was available close to the surface, good fresh water for gardening, where rain falls a bit higher than in southeastern Arabia.

So it was a great place for people to live in the Umunna period, but in the nature of their living has helped to destroy much of the evidence that they left behind in terms of settlement.

So we have their tombs only.

As we move into the second millennium at Shimul, it's famous for its huge, vast megalithic graveyard, where we have more than a hundred large megalithic tombs of different designs than in the Umunna period, usually made of cruder stone, but huge pieces of stone weighing tons that are used to make monuments that might be 20 or 25 meters long.

and used for collective burials.

These are situated at the back of the plain, at the base of the mountains, away from the good agricultural land.

And it seems that we have evidence for a large population in this part of the Northern Emirates from these burial remains, even though we still have no evidence for settlement at this period.

So Shimmel is a real enigma in the early part of the second millennium BC.

It's clear that people are living there in large numbers during a period where population declines elsewhere.

But we haven't got their settlements, just their burials.

And as we move from the early second millennium BC into the late second millennium after about 1500 BC, settlement across Southeastern Arabia declines really quite dramatically.