FOUND: 8,000-YEAR-OLD VILLAGE THAT REWRITES THE UAE’S HISTORY
Landmark discovery of Stone Age settlement on Marawah Island reveals how our earliest ancestors lived
Archaeologists have found the remains of an 8,000-year-old village that is believed to have been home to the UAE’s earliest settlers.
The landmark discovery on Marawah Island is evidence of the first houses built in the region, when people ceased to be nomads and settled as a community.
The find has turned ideas of how people first lived in the area on their head and given a remarkable insight into how they may have lived.
Experts from the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi say that settled communities existed during a time when previously it was thought only nomads roamed.
Up to 10 well-preserved dwellings, the first of their kind, were discovered on the island, located about 30 kilometres off the coast near Mirfah.
The evidence discovered has allowed experts to begin a digital reconstruction of the village, which they believe was occupied for several hundred years.
New radiocarbon dating data shows the community was established in a period known as the New Stone Age, or nearly 8,000 years ago.
The houses consist of living rooms and outdoor spaces used to prepare food and keep animals. Each is very similar in design and construction.
“Although finds from this time have been discovered elsewhere in the UAE, until now no architecture had been found,” the culture department said.
It means that Marawah could have been where people first settled in one place to build structures, abandoning a nomadic life centred around their flocks of sheep and goats.
In other parts of the Middle East, this has been linked to the development of agriculture, a process sometimes called the Neolithic Revolution.
“At Marawah it is believed an entirely novel process led to the construction of the village,” said DCT Abu Dhabi.
Rather than growing crops, the inhabitants of Marawah settled down to exploit the resources of the Arabian Gulf, experts believe.
One of a group of offshore islands that run west along the Abu Dhabi coast as far as Sir Bani Yas, Marawah Island has long been known as a place of archaeological interest.
It was here, 8,000 years ago, that a group of nomads settled and built houses for the first time.
Millennia later, in 1829, a survey ship for the East India Company finally recorded the island’s location for the maps.
It was another 150 years until the Abu Dhabi Islands Survey, commissioned by UAE Founding Father Sheikh Zayed, identified 13 sites of interest on the island, dating from the Neolithic period to Islamic times.
The survey said the island was in “an area renowned for its dangerous navigation waters”, rising only seven metres above sea level and part of a limestone plateau. It had three small population centres, providing seasonal shelter for fisherman, the largest of which was Liffa.
More than 50 archaeological structures or features were found, along with dozens of flint tools, and a mound partly concealing a curved dry stone wall.
“Its date remained uncertain,” the survey noted and said that the site’s location “would have provided an excellent base for hunting and fishing, with easy access to a rich sea life including fish, dugong and crustaceans”.
In 2004 more details emerged, with a new discovery by a team from Adias working with the Environment Agency.
Beginning in spring 2003, digging began on a site known as MR-11, a group of stone mounds that revealed several structures, the best preserved being a house with walls still standing at a height of more than a metre in some places.
A flint spear and arrowhead were also found, along with a fragment of a pestle used for grinding food.
Samples of ash from some of the floors were sent to the University of Glasgow for carbon dating, and dated to about 6,500 or 7,000 years ago.
Later excavations unearthed an intact and highly decorated ceramic jar, made in what is now Iraq, and firm evidence that the people of Marawah were part of an extensive trade route along the Gulf.
Two years ago, evidence of the first inhabitants of the ancient community came to light. Under part of a collapsed roof, a partial skeleton was found, leading archaeologists to conclude that the building was a “house of the dead”.
Later a second skeleton was found, with archaeologist Ahmed Abdalla Elhag Elfaki observing that it was a “form of burial typical of other known Late Stone Age burials, such as those known from Jebel Buhais in Sharjah”.
It is now believed the Marawah community existed for several hundred years, thriving in a time when the region was much wetter and greener than today, with freshwater lakes and plentiful game to hunt.
Other Neolithic sites discovered in the UAE include a shell midden, or refuse dump, in Umm Al Quwain. Evidence shows these early inhabitants hunted gazelle, kept sheep, dogs and goats, and organised expeditions to find flint.
Even earlier is Jebel Feyar in Sharjah, where 125,000 stone axes were found, evidence that early mankind trekked through the region as they made their way out of Africa. More recent sites include the 5,000-year-old Umm Al Nar tomb, also in Sharjah, and a similar structure in Ras Al Khaimah. A Bronze Age settlement was found