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. ...