Analysis of sustainability and reorganisation of Arabian coastal Neolithic socio-ecological systems

NeoArabia is an interdisciplinary and multi-scalar project, dealing with the very long term of the Arabian Neolithic (6200-2800 BC). Focused on environments and the mobility of coastal human communities, it intends to test the societal resilience at scales from the site to the region, using socio-environmental scenarios. In this region, highly productive marine environments, favoured by coastal upwelling, compensate in part for relatively limited inland resources. This led to intense exploitation of marine and lagoon-deltaic resources from the Neolithic onwards. A regional multi-site approach has never been proposed in this area before. It will span a latitudinal transect of ~1000 km, selecting the most promising field sites and micro-regional windows that have been documented by the French Archaeological Missions of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from Ra’s al-Khaimah, in the Northern United Arab Emirates (UAE, 25,5°N-55,6°E) to the Dhofar region, in the South of the Sultanate of Oman (16°N-53,45°E). We aim to characterise the complexity and variety of socio-environmental reorganisation processes of a sub-continent that has been affected by large S-N variations of the Indian-Arabian monsoon (IAO) system and sea level oscillations during the Mid-Holocene period. This had a number of climatic, hydrological, and biological effects, at scales from the local to the regional, which to date are only partially known and understood.