Research > Research projects > Marshlands, islands and marine coasts. Social complexities, tribal alliances and human mobility between Southern Mesopotamia and Eastern, South-Eastern Arabia during the 3rd and 2nd millennium BCE.
Director: Marco Ramazzotti
The complex and seldom-conflictual relationships between (semi)nomadic human communities and settled societies, including urban communities have shaped human history since the earliest phases of sedentism. The ‘alternative’ ways to social complexity
experienced by the nomads due to the intrinsic need to create ephemeral settlements left behind a light and sparse archaeological record. It is often hard to interpret, and is mostly made of funerary complexes. Nonetheless, the importance and the contribution to
our history made by ‘liquid and mobile societies’ is undeniable. Today, technological advancements in archeological and historical sciences, new ways of reading the past landscape, and, previously-unimaginable computational power enable the design of a
research project centered on giving a new voice to this part of our ancestors, which is often excluded from the mainstream of archaeological reconstructions. Through the use of an interdisciplinary (archaeological, historical, and geographical) approach in
conjunction with new cutting-edge technology (remote sensing, spatial analysis, and computational modeling), the project aims to investigate the socio-economic morphology and political-territorial organization of the half-nomadic and nomadic communities that
occupied the area between south-eastern Arabia and southern Mesopotamia in the third and second millennium BCE. This multidisciplinary research objective is to map the spatial patterns and dynamics of human mobility that took place in the marshlands, islands and marine coasts of the lands of Sumer, Dilmun and Magan during the 3rd and 2nd millennium BCE connecting the great civilizations that arose along the shores of the Arabian / Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. According to the ancient Near East epigraphic and literary tradition, these ‘lands’ and landscapes were inhabited by mobile groups in contact with each other but with different identities and territorial borders; their intermittent appearance between the south-eastern Arabian Peninsula and southern Mesopotamia was related to the most significant macro-economic processes and political events of ancient Near East’s third and
second millennia history, such as the formations of the so-called ‘secondary cities’, the collapse of the ‘first world empire’, the renaissance of ‘territorial states’ and the ‘spread of nomads and half-nomads’ tribes along the south-western fringes of Eurasia.
Collaborators:
Maria Fabrizia Buongiorno - INVG (Substitute Principal Investigator)
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Further details about this research:
- Research type: Research project PRIN
- Research topic: SH6_3 General archaeology, archaeometry, landscape archaeology; SH6_1 Historiography, theory and methods in history, including the analysis of digital data; SH7_10 GIS, spatial analysis; big data in geographical studies
- Fundings: 2022BTKA9Y Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca