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gunpoint, and temporary confinement by the military.
Although sporadic discoveries were reported in the decades following 1952, it was not until 1974 that a French mission, working at Shabwa, capital of the kingdom of Hadhramaut, resumed regular excavations, which have continued, off and on, to this day. By the late 1970s, a research station of the German Archaeological Institute (deutsches archäologisches institut) had been established in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, and in the early 1980s, an important Italian expedition began working on Bronze Age remains in the country. At about the same time the AFSM resumed work in the Wadi al-Jubah under the direction of J. Sauer. Several years later, a Soviet team, working in what was then the communist People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, established a mission with excavations both at Qana on the coast and Raybun in the Hadhramaut.
At the time of writing, tribal conflicts had once again curtailed work by Italian, French, and German scholars in the northern part of Yemen where the political authority of the central government is weak. The 1990 political unification of the two Yemens also brought tensions to the surface between authorities who had formerly been responsible for antiquities in each state, which exacerbated an already difficult situation.
A primitive attempt to excavate several burial mounds on Bahrain in 1879 by Captain E.L. Durand was the first archaeological excavation of any kind on the Arabian peninsula. Durand was followed by a series of amateurs, including Mr. and Mrs. T. Bent (1889), A. Jouannin (1903), Captain F.B. Prideaux (1906), Major C.K. Daly (1921–1926), and E.J.H. Mackay (1925). In the early 1950s, T.G. Bibby, an employee in Bahrain of the Iraq Petroleum Company, developed an interest in the mystery of the more than 100,000 burial mounds that dot the northern portion of the main island. Bibby contacted his old friend, the Danish prehistorian P.V. Glob. Bibby, who had worked with Glob in Norway and had himself married a Dane, proposed that a Danish team come to work on Bahrain. At the same time, R.H. Dyson of the University of Pennsylvania made a similar proposal to the emir of Bahrain, who consulted his British adviser, Sir Charles Belgrave, as to how best to proceed. Belgrave chose to toss a coin, and the Danes won.
That was the beginning of what grew into the largest foreign expedition ever mounted by Denmark. Glob put separate teams to work in the 1950s and 1960s not only at the great mound of Qalat al-Bahrain but on Bronze Age and Hellenistic settlements on Failaka (Kuwait), prehistoric sites in Qatar, and third-millennium graves and habitation sites (Umm an-Nar, Hili, Qattarah) in what were then the Trucial States (now the United Arab Emirates). An entire generation of Danish archaeologists participated in the Gulf expeditions, including H.H. Andersen, K. Frifelt, K. Jeppesen, H. Kapel, P. Kjærum, and P. Mortensen. Frifelt subsequently went on to conduct her own fieldwork at Bat in Oman while several of the others are or have been involved in the publication of the massive amount of material generated by the dozens of excavations and surveys conducted by the expedition. Publication of these results has been a major problem, however, partly because most of the people involved went on to assume posts dealing with Danish prehistory that gave them neither the time nor the institutional context in which to adequately digest and analyze the results of the fieldwork.
Since the end of the Danish expedition in 1965, much excavation has been conducted by French scholars such as M. Kervran and P. Lombard, and during the 1990s, a British expedition at Saar has been uncovering a large settlement of the early second millennium. Bahrain is also exceptional for the high level of involvement on the part of local nationals. The Department of Antiquities has conducted salvage excavations at literally thousands of graves threatened by development during the fifteen years before 2000.
Unable to continue her work in Iran after the 1966 excavations at Bampur, the British archaeologist B. de Cardi began survey work in Ras al-Khaimah, the northernmost of what was then the Trucial States, in 1968. This was followed in
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