A Bronze Age settlement hidden on the Arabian Peninsula reveals secrets about the slow growth of urbanization in the region.
© Charloux et al., 2024, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0A virtual 3D reconstruction of al-Natah, a Bronze Age settlement in Saudi Arabia.
A small 4,400-year-old town in the Khaybar Oasis of Saudi Arabia hints that Bronze Age people in this region were slow to urbanize, unlike their contemporaries in Egypt and Mesopotamia, a new study finds.Archaeologists discovered the site near the city of Al-'Ula in the Hejaz region of western Saudi Arabia and called it "al-Natah." The settlement covered about 3.7 acres (1.5 hectares), "including a central district and nearby residential district surrounded by protective ramparts," the researchers said in a statement. But the town, which was occupied starting around 2400 B.C., was small, with a population of only around 500 people, the team noted in a study, published Wednesday (Oct. 30) in the journal
PLOS One.The residential area had a large amount of pottery and grinding stones, as well as the remains of at least 50 dwellings that may have been made of earthen materials. The central area had two buildings that may have been used as administrative areas, the team wrote in the paper. In the western part of the central area, a necropolis was found. It has large and high circular tombs that archaeologists call "stepped tower tombs."
No examples of writing have been found so far at the site, study lead author
Guillaume Charloux, an archaeologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), told Live Science in an email. Researchers have unearthed only a few traces of cereals, but based on finds at other sites it's likely that al-Natah's people grew crops near the site, Charloux said.
The town and its nearby areas were surrounded by a 9-mile-long (14.5 kilometers) wall, which would have
provided defense from raids carried out by nomads, the team wrote in an earlier paper published in the
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.The town was
abandoned sometime between 1500 and 1300 B.C., but researchers aren't sure why this happened. "It's a pertinent question that I can't really answer at the moment," Charloux said, noting that "we have very few clues about the last phase of occupation."
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