The organization of settlement in highland Yemen during the Bronze and Iron Ages

Until the early 1980s when Alessandro de Maigret recognised and defined for the first time the Bronze Age of south-west Arabia (de Maigret 1990), archaeologists were faced with an embarrassing gap in the cultural sequence of Yemen. This gap, between the Neolithic and the late second millennium ВС was, moreover, balanced by an equivalent gap in our geographical knowledge of the archaeology of early communities in the Yemeni highlands. Although a number of reconnaissances had been made of the highlands south of Sanca3, the lack of a ceramic sequence inhibited the recognition of early settlement. Not only is it now possible to start to fill in this chronological gap with a range of Bronze Age and Iron Age cultures, we can also discern some patterns in the distribution of settlement. Here various factors that influenced the development of landscape and settlement structure in the Dhamar region are described from the late fourth millennium ВС up to the recent past. Since 1994, six seasons of archaeological surveys have been conducted in the Dhamar region by a team from the Oriental Institute, Chicago. These studies have demonstrated that from at least the early third millennium ВС, the highlands of Yemen were occupied by numerous villages and towns. This paper will examine the macroscopic structure of the landscape, and will describe how settlements related to large intermontane basins, route systems, and other landscape features. The cultural landscape will also be examined within the context of environmental change as deduced from sedimentary sequences recorded through ancient lakes and marshes. This approach enables us to see how cultural development has occurred in the context of a changing physical environment.