Jysk Arkæologisk Selskabs Skrifter – Serie

The Early Bronze Age Tombs of Jebel Hafit presents fifty burial mounds excavated by Moesgaard Museum in 1961-1971 in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi in the Arabian Gulf. These excavations were the first archaeological investigations at all in this part of the world, and they throw light on the beginning of the Bronze Age on the Oman Peninsula. The graves represent a fundamental transformation of the relationship between humans and the environment in the region, preceding the emergence of oasis agriculture. The graves contain the first objects of copper in the region and show that the exploitation of copper from the Oman mountains had begun. The tombs of Jebel Hafit are inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage list. The publication is the result of a cooperation between the Abu Dhabi Tourism & Culture Authority and Moesgaard Museum.

The Royal Mounds of A'ali in Bahrain has long been shrouded in mystery and suspected to be the final resting place of the Bronze Age kings of Dilmun. Puzzled by their great size explorers and professional archaeologists have for hundreds of years attempted to penetrate their interior and wrestle secrets and treasures from the tombs. This book presents information from the early days of archaeological exploration at A'ali as well as new data from the joint Bahrain - Moesgaard Museum investigations 2010 -2016 directed by the author. The evidence from both old and new field explorations at A'ali are meticulously analyzed. The results are discussed with a strong focus on the royal cemetery as an institution, using a theoretical approach based on the anthropology and ethnography of death rituals. Emphasis is also placed on developing an architectural typology and a radio-carbon based chronology of the royal tombs at A'ali. In this study, vast quantities of hitherto unpublished data from excavations in the burial mounds of Bahrain is integrated to allow a more informed and diachronic picture of the evolution in tomb architecture, death rituals and social organization in the Early Dilmun period, c. 2200-1700 BC. Philological evidence is presented which demonstrates that the entombed kings were of Amorite ancestry. The study reveals that the Amorite Dynasty buried at A'ali emerged with the formation of huge monumental tombs in a royal cemetery proper around 2000-1900 BC and lost its grip on power c. 1700 BC.

This two-volume, multi-author and multi-disciplinary monographs sheds new light on the Bronze Age in Thy from many different angles, and places the archaeology of the area in both a detailed regional and a broader supra-regional North Sea context. It provides a high-resolution archaeological and paleoecological picture og the organisation of landscapes, settlements and households during the period 1500-700 BC. By combining the results of paleoenvironmental research, extensive field surveys and excavations of archaeological sites with exceptional preservation, it links the histories of local farmsteads in Thy with wider developments and events in the Bronze Age of northwest Europe.

The seabed in southern Scandinavia contains numerous traces of a submerged prehistoric landscapes. Large parts of this landscape were gradually flooded by rising seas between 9500 and 4000 BC and perceptions of the Maglemose culture (9500-6400 BC) have consequently been based almost exclusively on former inland settlements. This book investigate two questions that are directly related to our current understanding of the populations of the now submerged areas: 1) Do we have a repre­sentative picture of the spread of Early Mesolithic sites in southern Scandinavia, or does the weighting towards inland sites reflect the fact that coastal sites have not been identified below present-day sea-level? 2) How did sea-level rise impact Mesolithic populations at different temporal and spatial scales, and how were these experienced from 8000-4000 BC? These questions are examined in the light of eight new coastline models that are made to determine the Mesolithic coastline positions and to facilitate new evaluations of possible relationships between sea-level changes and cultural changes.