There is no single formula for the success of an
archaeological expedition. Different goals require
the use of different strategies. If, for example, you
are interested in how people adapted to their
landscape through time, then you have got to
look at, if not excavate, many different sites
throughout an entire region. If you are interested
in documenting change and development at a
local level, then you will have to find a site which
holds out the promise of having been lived at for
a long time, and excavate it in such a way that
you expose levels dating to a variety of different
periods. If you are interested in finding complete
pots and other goodies, and have a museum full
of cases which need filling, then you had better go
for tombs since settlements often lack wellpreserved
objects. And if you want to get
anywhere with your research, you had better be
prepared to share. This means forming a team,
apportioning topics to the members, delegating
responsibility, and letting go of the site so that
everybody involved comes to have just as much
interest in and commitment to the project as you
do. Twelve people can achieve so much more
than one and being a good project director means
facilitating the work of others as much as, if not
more than, pursuing your o w n particular research
interests. The days when Sir Flinders Petrie, Sir
Leonard Woolley or Sir Mortimer Wheeler
presented themselves as 'the' excavator of a site,
when in reality they had a force of 400 local
workmen and a couple of cronies to help draw
plans and label objects, are over. Archaeological
projects are most successful when
they are cooperative, inter-disciplinary
and populated by interested
and motivated students and scholars
committed to adding to the body of
knowledge about a region.
So what about the site? What
makes a 'good' site? I hope that by
the time you have read this book
you will see that a site is only as
good as what an archaeological
team makes of it. It is not a matter of
how many grams of gold or complete
stone vessels you find or h o w high
the walls stand that determines
whether a site is "good' or 'bad'.
Archaeologists and their colleagues in the natural,
analytical sciences have the ability to spin hay
into gold, to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
They can turn what may look like an unprepossessing
site into a veritable gold-mine of insight if
they are creative in the use of their analytical
firepower. A site may not yield a lot by way of
'goodies', gold figurines or n e w inscriptions, but
if half a dozen post-graduates are unleashed on
the material and discover unexpected residues left
by the burning of hitherto unsuspected organic
substances, or tiny droplets of copper which
show that metal was being cast, or size differences
in animal bones which permit the discrimination
of domestic animals from wild, then they have
truly taken their data, unassuming as it may have
looked, and made something significant out of it.
So, I suppose, the moral of the story is that great
archaeological sites are made great by the archaeologists
w h o work on the material excavated.
They are not great in the first place.
This book is about one site in the Emirates
called Tell Abraq, a large mound rising over 10m
above the surrounding plain near the junction of
the coastal highway linking Abu Dhabi and Ras
al-Khaimah, and the inland road from U m m al-
Qaiwain to Falaj al-Mu'alla. It is a significant site
for precisely the reasons outlined above, because
the students and colleagues w h o have worked on
its material have uncovered significance in their
data. Tell Abraq is tiny in comparison with the
enormous tells of Mesopotamia and Iran. Its
sequence of some 2000 years is short when set
alongside that of Troy or Jericho. Tell Abraq did
not yield a lot of goodies, at least not until the
final seasons when w e excavated a tomb located
right within the settlement. It provided us with no
inscriptions. It is not the first, the biggest, the
oldest, the only anything. But it is an important
site because it has been made to deliver up its
secrets by the gentle cajoling of gamma-rays,
scanning electron microscopes, electron microprobes,
accelerator mass spectrometers and ion
beams in the hands of students and colleagues
w h o know how, when and why to deploy some
fairly sophisticated science in the cause of archaeology.
Tell Abraq is a site which has been taken by
the scruff of the neck, in the hands of numerous
undergraduates, post-graduates and professional
archaeologists and scientists in the United States,
Europe and Australia, and shaken until its secrets
have been revealed.
W h e n I first visited Tell Abraq in 1986 with
several colleagues I was not particularly impressed.
It was a hot day and I remember feeling pretty
jet-lagged. T w o years later I was back on m y own,
prowling over the surface of the mound, looking
for signs that this was a site that would tell me
what I wanted to know. I had conducted two
seasons of excavation at al-DOr, a first century
A D site located a few kilometres away, and was
Postholes, postholes everywhere.
Apart from the fortification, the
tomb, the mudbrick platform and
a few walls near the northern end
of the site, there was relatively
little standing architecture at Tell
Abraq, but metres and metres of
soil with numerous postholes
bear witness to continuous
occupation over the course of
2000 years.

frankly bored with working on such a restricted
period of time. I longed for a site which would
allow m e to push back the local sequence into
the earlier periods in the Emirates' past. I thought,
by the look of some of the
sherds on the surface, that
Tell Abraq's sequence ought
to extend back into the
early first millennium B C at
the veiy least. I had a very
skilled Danish archaeologist,
Anne-Marie Mortensen from
Aarhus, joining m e for the
1989 season at al-Dur and I
decided I would put Anne-
Marie on Tell Abraq and see what happened. It
would be an understatement to say that I was not
prepared for the result. For several days into the
excavation I found myself staring at pottery
typical of the period c. 2300-2000 BC. ...