1973 by the visit of a team of Iraqi archaeologists on a goodwill mission to the newly created United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Iraqis conducted soundings at a host of important sites, including Tell Abraq, ed-Dur, Mleiha, Julfar, and al-Qusais. Excavation activity remained sporadic, however, until the mid-1980s when teams from Belgium, Great Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland began to focus their efforts on a wide range of prehistoric and early historic sites. More recently, Australian and Spanish teams have also begun work in the UAE.

The reasons behind this flurry of activity, which continues to this day, are varied. Many of the scholars involved had formerly worked in Iran or Iraq, areas no longer accessible for political reasons. The comparative ease of working in the UAE, the high level of support given to foreign teams by local governments, the relatively unbureaucratic nature of the enterprise when compared to conditions in many other countries in western Asia, and the inherent interest of the archaeological problems being investigated have all contributed to a burgeoning of archaeological research in southeastern Arabia.

Archaeology in Kuwait, initially dominated by the Danish expedition, was later pursued by the American T.H. Carter and, from 1983 to 1988, by a French mission led by J.-F. Salles. Interrupted by the Gulf War, French excavations have now resumed on several of the smaller offshore islands.

Archaeology in Oman, on the other hand, has had quite a different history. Following the expulsion of Wendell Phillips’s team from Yemen, the AFSM turned its sights on Oman where R. Cleveland initiated excavations at Sohar in 1958. Prior to that time, the region had been only sporadically explored during the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was not until Sultan Qaboos deposed his father Sultan Taimur in 1970 that the country moved from a state of medieval isolation to one of comparative wealth as its oil resources were exploited.

The creation of a Ministry of Heritage and Culture was an early, enlightened move on the part of the new ruler, as was the appointment of the late Andrew Williamson from Oxford, an expert in the archaeology and economic history of medieval Iran, as the ministry’s archaeological adviser. Williamson invited archaeologists from Harvard University to undertake the first systematic surveys and test excavations in Oman, and other scholars, including B. de Cardi and M. Tosi, soon initiated new projects.

In spite of the death of Williamson in 1975, when the Land Rover he was in (with a military escort) hit a landmine in Dhofar (where the communist-backed guerrillas supporting the separation of Dhofar Province from the Sultanate of Oman had only recently been suppressed), archaeological exploration by foreign teams flourished in the 1970s and early 1980s, not least because of the care and support provided by the Italian archaeologist P. Costa, who succeeded Williamson as archaeological adviser. A major focus of work by a team led by G. Weisgerber from the German mining museum in Bochum has been the investigation of copper metallurgy in the Oman mountains and the identification of Oman with the copper supply area known in Mesopotamian cuneiform sources as Magan. Italian surveys and excavations by M. Tosi and P. Biagi have focused on maritime adaptation in coastal Oman.

Saudi Arabia

Territorially speaking, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia occupies the largest portion of the Arabian peninsula, but paradoxically, archaeological exploration there has lagged far behind what has been achieved in most of the other countries on the peninsula. The earliest explorations in the Hejaz brought to light important epigraphic finds, many of which are to be found today in the louvre in Paris (since most of the early explorers were French) and Istanbul (because the Hejaz was, nominally at least, part of the Ottoman Empire). However, the fanaticism and xenophobia of the population, most of whom belonged to the Wahhabi sect of Islamic fundamentalists, meant that exploration was very limited throughout the early twentieth century, and individuals who were able to travel freely throughout Saudi Arabia, such as H. St. J.B. Philby, a close friend of the founder of the kingdom, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, were rare. A major influx of American oilmen and their families began in the 1930s,