ANAPAN A New Approach to Pottery of Arabia and its Neighbors

Novel archaeological research in the Arabian Peninsula has discovered very extended desert oases that were occupied permanently, beginning over 5000 years ago. Among the most important are Qurayyah and Tayma, located in North-West Arabias Hejaz region. Of the thousands of artefacts uncovered in the stratigraphic excavations of these sites, the most common is surely pottery. Because field research in this region is very recent, the many ceramic types that were manufactured in the oases of the Hejaz often featuring a beautiful painted decoration have remained almost unknown. However, older investigations had shown that pottery identical to the one stemming from North Arabia was found in specific sites in the Southern Levant, the most notable being the Egyptian shrine in the copper mining site of Timna, Israel, and neighboring sites in Jordan, such as Barqa el- Hetiye. Through the international project ANAPAN (funded by FWF and DFG), a team from the University of Vienna and the German Archaeological Institute, in cooperation with the Austrian Archaeological Institute (OeAI/OeAW), the TU Wien and the University of Innsbruck, will analyze all successive pottery collections, which were produced and used in Qurayyah and Tayma, for three thousand years: from the Early Bronze Age down to the Iron Age (3000-300 BCE). The aim of this interdisciplinary project is understanding in detail how ancient ceramic was crafted: where the source of the clay was; which minerals were mixed into the fabrics; how they were shaped into vessels; which chemical recipes were established. This information will be obtained through analyses such as microstratigraphy, for a high-resolution study of clay mixing basins; ceramic petrography; Neutron-Activation Analysis to identify chemical composition and trace elements. Evaluating these results for different chronological phases, each dated through radiocarbon measurements, will show how the technological development achieved by ancient potters changed throughout the millennia. Comparing developments in pottery manufacturing at the two major North Arabian oases allows us to differentiate local decisions from shared regional characteristics. Once we have determined the precise chemical fingerprints of the assemblages from each Qurayyah and Tayma, we will compare them with each other and with similar finds from four localities in Southern Jordan. This will lead us to understand whether Hejazi pottery was imported directly from North Arabia or whether the Southern Levantine settlements imitated the painted vessels from the desert oases by using local clay; as well as which technological, cultural and commercial networks were established, maintained and modified in the Greater Levantine region through time. The innovative aspect of the project lies in its focus on a region long neglected by research, the implementation of systematic analysis of an unprecedentedly high number of samples and granting open access of our results.