{"id":348,"date":"2015-05-03T09:34:33","date_gmt":"2015-05-03T09:34:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/archaeology.sa\/en\/?p=348"},"modified":"2015-05-03T09:34:33","modified_gmt":"2015-05-03T09:34:33","slug":"by-questioning-conventional-wisdom-archaeologys-peter-magee-unearths-the-arabian-peninsulas-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/?p=348","title":{"rendered":"By Questioning Conventional Wisdom, Archaeology\u2019s Peter Magee Unearths the Arabian Peninsula\u2019s Past"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Image<\/a>
Image from a drone of the Tell Abraq settlement in the UAE<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When most archaeologists look at a map of the Middle East, they\u2019re drawn to hot excavation spots such as Mesopotamia and Egypt.<\/p>\n

Not Bryn Mawr\u2019s Peter Magee. The 47-year-old professor of Near Eastern archaeology prefers the Arabian Peninsula, an area that many scholars have ignored. Arabia, the argument has long gone, was nothing more than miles of \u201cdreary desert,\u201d as one academic put it in 1889. In other words, the region\u2019s past seemed to offer little for scholarly exploration. It certainly didn\u2019t have the complex social states of Mesopotamia or the hieroglyphs of Egypt.<\/p>\n

When Magee, however, studies that same map, he sees something entirely different. \u201cI kept looking at the map,\u201d he says of his undergraduate days at the University of Sydney, \u201cand thinking, \u2018It\u2019s very unlikely that there\u2019s nothing there.’\u201d<\/p>\n

As an expert on the ancient Near East, Magee argues that the conventional dismissive view of the region is \u2018simultaneously ethnocentric and stereotypical.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018I think, really, to be a good scholar you need to be constantly questioning what you\u2019re taught,\u201d he says \u201cWas it actually that way? To me, it is very, very interesting to interrogate the past and what we think about the past\u2014and to shift it a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n

For nearly a quarter century, Magee has worked to bring understanding and attention to the Arabian Peninsula, a vast area that takes in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait. His groundbreaking research on the region\u2019s unique irrigation systems and on the domestication of camels has added to the growing record that Arabia has a rich archaeological history.<\/p>\n

For the eighth year over winter break, Magee took Bryn Mawr students on a four-week field study to excavate at Tell Abraq about 20 miles outside Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. His ambitious recent (2014) book, The Archaeology of Prehistoric Arabia: Adaptation and Social Formation from the Neolithic to the Iron Age (Cambridge University Press), is fast becoming the definitive source on Arabia\u2019s past. Currently on sabbatical, Magee is editing his next book, The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Arabia (Oxford University Press).<\/p>\n

– See more at: http:\/\/news.brynmawr.edu\/2015\/02\/27\/by-questioning-conventional-wisdom-archaeologys-peter-magee-unearths-the-arabian-peninsulas-past\/#sthash.4gEnTIsH.dpuf
\n\u201cHe is without question one of the leading scholars on the Iron Age of Eastern Arabia,\u201d says D.T. Potts, a professor of ancient Near Eastern archaeology and history at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. A leader in the field himself, he was Magee\u2019s doctoral thesis adviser and first exposed him to the UAE\u2019s Tell Abraq and Muweilah digs in the early 1990s.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think he clearly wants this area taken note of by archaeologists working in other parts of the world,\u201d Potts says. \u201cThe way I see the world, and Peter sees the world, is not black and white. It\u2019s much more a mosaic of cultures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Magee wants to break apart assumptions about the way of life in the ancient Near East. Major excavation sites point to a hierarchical state society in the wider region. Those models, though, don\u2019t account for settlements such as Tell Abraq and Muweilah.<\/p>\n

These villages and towns, Magee posits, sought social cohesion and actively resisted the structured, hierarchical systems of their neighbors.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are societies that are vastly different,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat it suggests to us is that there are a myriad of different ways in which people can exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many scholars, though, have doubts or simply lack interest in an area without a complex state, Magee allows. At a major 2012 congress on the ancient Near East, only eight of 250 papers\u2014just 3 percent\u2014reported on the Arabian Peninsula. Clearly, progress toward shifting opinions is painstakingly slow, figuratively sand grain by sand grain.<\/p>\n

But this skeptic\u2019s skeptic who is most intellectually invigorated when he\u2019s challenging the mainstream also has an optimist\u2019s bent.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have no great desire to work anywhere else at the moment,\u201d says Magee, whose excavations in the UAE are supported by the Sharjah Directorate of Archaeology (UAE) and the Carus Trust Funds within the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology. \u201cWe are on the cusp of really pushing this region to much better exposure. So I want to stay on it while that process unfolds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Magee, who teaches courses as varied as Introduction to Near Eastern Archaeology, The Archaeology of Middle Eastern Cuisine, and graduate seminars on archaeometric techniques, brings to his classroom his questioning mindset\u2014and encourages the same in his students. Rather than use a single textbook, he has them read divergent viewpoints, discuss topics, and write a term paper.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe really likes to question archaeology dogma,\u201d says Lara Fields \u201917 from Houston whose double major is in anthropology and classical and Near Eastern archaeology. \u201cIt\u2019s not us just taking on what he believes is an accurate representation of the past, but actually creating our own.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fields was one of four undergraduate and two graduate students on the Tell Abraq field study. The experience, she says, both opened her eyes to the hard work of archaeologists and affirmed her choice of major.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe excavated from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m.,\u201d Fields says of her first dig, which included excavating a collapsed section of a massive fortification wall. \u201cIt was a lot of manual labor, shoveling. But it was exciting because you found stuff, sherds of pottery, lumps of bronze, a couple of camel figures.\u201d<\/p>\n

The professor was particularly excited about those camel pieces. In 1994, at the Muweilah dig, Magee himself unearthed a terracotta camel with a saddle. To this day, it is considered the most complete such figurine\u2014and, he says, it is arguably the best-dated representation of a domesticated dromedary in the world. The Sharjah Archaeological Museum in Dubai uses a depiction of that camel on its front gates.<\/p>\n

Currently, Magee is collaborating on DNA work on camel bones to more definitively determine whether dromedaries were domesticated in the area (as his earlier work has suggested) or introduced from elsewhere.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s turning up some tantalizing evidence,\u201d he says, unable to reveal more until the publication of the results.<\/p>\n

But needless to say, the very question itself challenges the norms.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the way,\u201d Magee says, \u201csociety moves forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u223c Lini Kadaba
\nPosted February 27th, 2015 at 11:26 am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When most archaeologists look at a map of the Middle East, they\u2019re drawn to hot excavation spots such as Mesopotamia and Egypt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":349,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=348"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":350,"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348\/revisions\/350"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.archaeology.sa\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}