An Early Bronze Age stone tool assemblage from al-Badʿ Oasis in northern Arabia: a technological and functional analysis

Abstract

Archaeological research on the 4th millennium BCE throughout the Levant has shown how craft specialization, extended trade and supply routes, as well as increased social stratification, established the foundation for the urban Early Bronze Age formation process in the third quarter of the 4th millennium BCE. The specific context of northern Arabia, along the fringes of the fertile crescent, remains, on the contrary, largely unexplored. In this paper lithic finds from an Early Bronze I village, named al-Rudaydah in al-Badʿ Oasis, situated in north-western Saudi Arabia, near the Red Sea, are presented. All the stone tool artefacts, over 100 lithics, found in a rectangular drystone masonry dwelling, were subjected to technological and traceological analyses. Most of the artefacts are small chips and flakes resulting from tool maintenance and recycling. Formal tools include so-called tabular scrapers and trapezoidal blade segments with gloss. The results show that the scrapers were likely imported as blanks or ready-made tools, the glossy artefacts were likely sickle insets.

Keywords:

• Early Bronze Age
• lithics
• spatial organization
• traceology
• northern Arabia

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to warmly thank Prince Badr bin Abdullah Al-Saud, Ministry of Culture, Jasir al-Herbich, CEO Heritage Commission and Dr Abdullah al-Zahrani, Director of Archaeology, and Heritage Commission team for their support. The oasis of al-Badʿ has been studied by the Saudi-French Archaeological Project in al-Badʿ directed by G. Charloux and S. Sahlah since 2017. In addition to the support from the Heritage Commission of the Saudi Ministry of Culture, the project benefits from the funding of many French institutions, in particular the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the Mondes sémitiques team at the laboratory Orient & Méditerranée (UMR 8167), the French Ministry of European and Foreign Affairs, the French Embassy in Riyadh and the French Centre for research on the Arabian Peninsula (Cefrepa). The analysis of the lithics material conducted by Y. Hilbert was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement number 101001889, REVIVE). We are in great debt to two anonymous reviewers for highlighting inconsistencies and shortcomings of an earlier version of this manuscript. We also thank Scott D. McLin and Eliot Braun for proofreading our manuscript and useful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The transitional Chalcolithic–EB I sites of Tall al-Magass and Tall Hujayrāt al-Ghuzlān in Aqaba precede that of Rudaydah by a few centuries (Khalil and Schmidt 2009).

2 Opened in 2019 by D. M. Cabaret and extended in 2021 by G. Charloux.

3 All lithics were returned to the Heritage Commission in Saudi Arabia on 27 September 2022.