In the Land of the Emirates: The Archaeology and History of the UAE.

• Author: Yule, Paul
• Position: Book review

In the Land of the Emirates: The Archaeology and History of the UAE. By D. T. Potts. Abu Dhabi: Sultan bin Zayed's Culture and Media Centre, 2012. Pp. 219, illus.

This attractive volume, result of the fruitful cooperation of the Trident Press with Professor Potts, centers on the territory that has become the United Arab Emirates. All of the Arab lands bordering the Gulf have commissioned similar books. This one is particularly successful, since the author and his publisher have been committed to this region for decades and have collected an excellent text and image material--sharp, optically balanced, and clear. Although this book is not academic in character, it updates the author's academic works on the UAE, most notably his two-volume handbook, The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity (Oxford 1990 and 1992), which while still useful, in several aspects understandably requires modification in light of twenty-one years of subsequent research.

Due to the cooperation of the author and publisher, several excellent images from its predecessors are available for this publication. Thus the beautiful coin on p. 153 is finally revealed to be Hormuzi, interesting for those of us who know it from an earlier attractive publication, which unfortunately lacked a caption: Archaeology of the United Arab Emirates (London, 2003), 194.

Potts's good relations with his colleagues manifest themselves in a ready access to their recent field results. The first half of the book is the most valuable, but this judgment reflects my own personal interests.

The narrative begins with the physical prerequisites that condition the beginning of settlement in the region. Beginning chronologically with the Old Stone Age, over half of the text deals with the periods ranging up to about 500 C.E. Standard period names include the time-honored Hafit, Umm an-Nar, and Wadi Suq. Potts and those in his circle prefer the term Iron Age to Lizq/Rumaylah or Early Iron Age. Nowadays the renaming of prehistoric periods is common.

New content comes especially in the form of the large neolithic cemetery excavated in the Sharjah Emirate at al-Buhais (cf. H.-P. Uerpmann, M. Uerpmann, and S. Jasim, Funeral Monuments and Human Remains from Jebel al-Buhais: The Archaeology of Jebel al-Buhais Sharjah, United Arab Emirates 1 [Tubingen 2006], 103-380), which provides a large body of osteometric data surpassing by far the 191 skeletons of the Samad Late Iron Age in the Sultanate of Oman (see M. Kunter in Die...