Ingenuity in the Oasis: An Examination of Early Bronze Age Agricultural Communities in Oman (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant)

Summary

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

This project will investigate the socio-economic foundations of oasis communities during the Early Bronze Age (EBA, ca. 3100BCE - 2000BCE) in southeastern Arabia. These relatively small-scale communities demonstrate strategic organizational and subsistence choices in extreme environments and climates that led to the establishment of widespread oasis agriculture communities across the landscape. This project will operate as a contextualized study of settlement patterning and plant cultivation and usage amongst EBA oasis communities in southeastern Arabia through the integration of geospatial, ethnoarchaeological, and archaeobotanical analyses. Decision-making strategies of EBA inhabitants will be contextualized and analyzed using niche construction frameworks that focus on humans as agents of cultural change. This project will examine how EBA communities organized themselves, practiced plant cultivation, strategized decision-making, and, thus, contributed to the maintenance and spread of oasis agriculture communities, which provided the socio-economic foundations for development of complexity in southeastern Arabia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• WGF - Support for Research Projects   •
• Wenner-Gren Foundation

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Wenner-Gren Foundation

Notes

Rights & Attribution: This resource is an application from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and has been approved by the grantee solely for pedagogical purposes. Please do not cite, circulate, or duplicate any part of these documents without the express written consent of the author.

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