Bronze Age Burial Mounds on Bahrain

Abstract

The island of Bahrain has this century been notable for two main reasons: its identification as Dilmun (Telmun), known from Sumerian to Neo-Assyrian times, and the striking presence of thousands of burial mounds (a recent estimate is 172,000-Larsen 1983). Both have been the cause of some disagreement and difference of interpretation. Recent archaeological work has made the issue of the mounds, their place and interpretation, somewhat clearer. This is none too soon. Comparatively little effort has been made to elucidate the island's own internal archaeology. None of the numerous Bronze Age settlements on the island has been systematically excavated. Bahrain's archaeological framework, instead, is mostly based on the Danish Expedition's limited excavation of Qala'at al-Bahrain in the 1950s and 60s, which remains largely unpublished. One of the results of this lack of settlement exploration and the inadequate publication of that already carried out is that the dating of the burial mounds, or at least those of Bronze Age date, has proved problematic, as has the whole of Bahrain's archaeological sequence. Recent work elaborating the ceramic chronology of the North Wall Sounding at Qala'at al-Bahrain by Larsen has been of considerable help. This has enabled broad guidelines to be established for the ceramic sequence from about 2300 B.C. to around 1700 B.C., the period to which the mounds date. Since 1981-82 thousands of burial mounds have been excavated as part of a rescue programm…