A Crowded Desert: early results from survey and excavation of nomadic sites in north-west Qatar

This paper presents the results and preliminary conclusions of the 2016 season of the Crowded Desert Project, aiming to find out about the nomadic occupation and its relations with the settled peoples in the region. Activities includes extensive and intensive surveys and excavations in the area delimited by the areas of Umm al-Mā’ and Mulayḥa in the North West desert of the Qatar Peninsula. Conclusions so far complement and expand the ideas developed during the pilot season of the project in 2015, but also provide finer chronological detail and a wider coverage of the area of research. The distribution of glass, metal and pottery recovered shows important chronological differences in the patterns of occupation of the landscape. The paper also presents observed differences of spatial distribution of features, showing how cairns (presumably pre-Islamic tombs), Islamic burials and cemeteries and mosques and places of prayer (sing. muṣallā, pl. muṣallayāt) are distributed with respect to the tents and inhabitation spaces found. Finally, this paper introduces the first stratigraphic and geoarchaeological assessments done in the area. Stratigraphic sequences are hard to find, and very often nothing remains of them around conserved structures. Even when some of them have been found, their interpretation is limited by their poor conservation and the constraints imposed by small trenches. A geoarchaeological program is being developed in the hope of overcoming these problems and providing an environmental information useful to understand the history of the region.