ENHG family field trip to the Mleiha Archeological Centre

Our family camping weekend on the 20 and 21st of October was really four trips in one, combining appreciation of our desert habitat with archaeology, geology and star gazing.

Archaelogy 

The Mleiha Archaeological Centre is a museum located next to a restored Umm Al-Nar tomb, with many other sites at various distances from the centre. 

The museum itself explains the importance of the sites around Mleiha in the context of the region’s history and development. Of special note are the paleolithic hand axes excavated at Faya in 2010 that have been dated reliably to over 120,000 years old. The museum contains a hologram of one of these hand axes, designed to show that these Faya tools are closer to the contemporaneous East African handiwork of Homo Sapiens than to  Neanderthal tools from sites in Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. Since no Homo Sapiens fossils older than 50,000 years ago have been identified outside of Africa, a number of conjectures arise as to how the axes got here. The museum contains a video re-enactment of one such hypothesis.

The museum then continues with the other artifacts discovered in and around Mleiha, from the late Stone Age through the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the pre-Isamic period and the Islamic and modern periods, which serves to remind us that this part of the Arabian peninsula has played an important role in the region’s history for many millenia.

Desert habitat and geology 

At 5:00 p.m., we drove in a convoy to the western edge of Jebel Mileiha, only about 5 minutes from the Archeological Centre. Tents were already set up and meal preparation was underway. Ajmal Hussein led us on a nature walk before it got dark, pointing out the native plants, including desert gourd (Citrullus colocynthis, or Hanzal in Arabic), spurge (Euphorbia larica), and Haloxylon salicornicum. which everyone calls by its Arabic name, Rimth. Gerbils gnaw on the Hanzal and camels love chomping on the Rimth, but nothing feeds on the spurge, which has an inedible white sap in its stalks. Ajmal explained that the gerbils in this part of the UAE are a species known as Cheesman’s Gerbils.

Ajmal’s colleague, Nirmal, explained the local geology, pointing out the two layers of limestone that overlay the ophiolites. The ophiolites are rocks from the upper mantle pushed up by tectonic movement; the Hajar mountains contain the world’s largest expanse of surface ophiolites. The limestone layers were laid down when the area was under an ocean, and as a result the place was teeming with fossils, most of which were different kind of molluscs and gastropods. Some looked like familiar snails, mussels and scallops, while others (rudists) are extinct today but were abundant back then, using one long conical shell to lodge themselves in sand while another smaller shell guarded the opening. Nirmal was able to give a fairly narrow range of dates for each specimen that we found -- most dated to 70 million to 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period. Later that night, Nirmal displayed an impressive collection of even more fossils, including ammonites, chambered nautiluses and sharks’ teeth.

  

The night sky 

Dinner was followed by some star gazing. Ajmal brought out a telescope, which afforded a good view of the Pleaides and several other objects. We were also treated to a view of the Geminid meteor shower, with several long a bright meteors streaking overhead as the night passed.

Morning nature walk 

Once we awoke ready for more, we drove over to a nearby formation known as Saddle Rock for a view of the sunrise. Again, limestone fossils were abundant. There were also tracks of the critters that had been wandering around while we slept, including foxes and gerbils. 

In all, the trip was an enjoyable and educational trip to a neighbouring Emirate that provided a welcome respite from the noise and crowds of the city.

Written by Charles Laubach.