Potts 2016 - Trends and patterns in the archaeology and pre-modern history of the Gulf region. In J.E. Peterson, ed. The Emergence of the Gulf States: Studies in Modern History. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 19-42. By D.T. Potts

https://www.academia.edu/26812845/Potts_2016_Trends_and_patterns_in_the_archaeology_and_pre_modern_history_of_the_Gulf_region_In_J_E_Peterson_ed_The_Emergence_of_the_Gulf_States_Studies_in_Modern_History_London_Bloomsbury_pp_19_42?email_work_card=title Recent decades have witnessed an explosion of archaeological and historical literature examining the past 8,000 years of human occupation in the Gulf region, but only rarely have scholars taken a step back from their particular fi elds of expertise to look more broadly for trends that might be relevant to both the earlier and the later periods, and to the Iranian and Arabian sides of the Gulf. Th e aim of this chapter is to examine a number of issues from an explicitly holistic perspective, before turning to some illustrations of interconnectedness or centripetal interaction in the Gulf from premodern times. To begin with, however, a few words about the physical confi guration of the Gulf are in order. Th e Gulf as we know it today is a shallow, epicontinental sea -a trough c. 1,000 km long, 200-350 km wide -bordered by eight countries: Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates ( UAE ), Oman (Raʾs Musandam) and Iran. Th e creation of this trough has been explained by the theory of plate tectonics and attributed to the movement of two of its plates. Sometime between c. twenty-fi ve million and twelve million years ago, the upthrust of the Arabian plate in the west against the Asian plate, followed by the downward warp of the eastern side of the Arabian Peninsula, created the fl oor of the Gulf. Th e formation of the Zagros Mountains c. 5 million to 2 million years ago caused the marine transgression that inundated the area, creating a vast sea. During the Late Pliocene (3.6 million to 2.6 million years ago), when sea levels worldwide were up to 150 m higher than they are today, the coasts of Arabia, Iraq and Iran were up to 100 km inland from where they currently are. Th ereaft er, cooler temperatures locked up more and more of the Earth's water supply in the polar ice caps, and sea levels fell accordingly. In the Gulf the successive phases of marine regression that ensued are marked by marine terraces at 110, 70, 50-45, 40-38, 25, 18-15 and 10-7 metres above modern sea level. Dating these episodes is diffi cult, however, and seismic activity, resulting in both tectonic uplift and subsidence, complicates our understanding of the geomorphology of the Gulf 's coasts. Between 70,000 and 17,000 years before the present, when worldwide sea levels were up to 120 m below their present levels, the trough between the southernmost ranges of the Zagros Mountains in Iran and the Arabian Shelf was not the shallow, epicontinental sea that it is today, but a river valley through which the combined ...