The Plover

At the end of our season last year, we had the pleasure of a lecture from Dr. Mark Beech, on the UAE's most prominent archaeologists, who gave us an overview of his top 10 discoveries during his time as a paleo-archaeologist in the UAE, from 1994, when he first fell in love with the country, to the present day. Dr. Beech is of course well known as a member of the team that discovered the Sir Bani Yas church and monastery complex, which now numbers 40 sites, among them courtyard houses, a monastery and villas. (Incidentally, the site was first discovered by an ENHG member, Caroline Layman, who found plaster in a llama pen on the island during a joint ENHG-DNHG field trip!) However, many of us are not aware of Dr. Beech’s ground-breaking discoveries in paleo-archaeology, which put the UAE on the map for some very significant finds. In this post, then, we will look at numbers 6-10 on his list of top 10 discoveries. We guarantee you’ll learn somet...

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 iden...