Discovery of Bronze Age settlement suggests northern Arabia was 'slow' to urbanise

Saudi Arabian settlement dating from 2400-1500BC suggests area was dominated by travelling communities and dotted with walled oases

3D virtual reconstruction of the Bronze Age site of Al Natah. Photo: Charloux et al

The discovery of a Bronze Age settlement in Saudi Arabia suggests north-west Arabia was “slow” to urbanise, a new study has found.

The growth of large urban settlements, when large numbers of people began to group in a concentrated area, was a major step in human evolution.

Although there were known to be larger towns in the early Bronze Age period, from 3300BC – 1200BC, in the Levant and Mesopotamia, the process has been difficult to study in northern Arabia, partly due to the lack of well-preserved archaeological sites in the region. But recently uncovered settlements have provided new insights – including one in the boundaries of Alula, Saudi Arabia's first Unesco World Heritage Site.

Al Natah, which was occupied from around 2400-1500BC, covered an area of approximately 1.5 hectares and included a central district and nearby residential section surrounded by walls. The houses were built in a standard plan and connected by small streets, say researchers.

A cluster of graves represents a necropolis, with burial practices indicating some degree of "social stratification", said Guillaume Charloux of the French National Center for Scientific Research, Paris and colleagues in the in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. The town was home to around 500 residents.

The size and shape of the town was like other sites of a similar age in northern Arabia, but they tended to be smaller and less “sociopolitically complex” than contemporary sites in the Levant and Mesopotamia, said the authors of the study.

“For the first time in north-western Arabia, a small Bronze Age town connected to a vast network of ramparts has been discovered by archaeologists, raising questions about the early development of local urbanism,” wrote the authors.

The findings suggest the area was at the time dominated by travelling communities and “dotted” with walled oases like Al Natah – pointing to a “slow” path to urbanisation compared to other regions.

“By comparison with neighbouring oasis centres, we suggest that North-western Arabia during the Bronze Age − largely dominated by pastoral nomadic groups and already integrated into long-distance trade networks − was dotted with interconnected monumental walled oases centred around small fortified towns,” wrote the authors.

“And by comparison with the contemporary situation in the Southern Levant, we also envisage that the archaeological record bears witness to a ‘low urbanisation’ (or ‘slow urbanism’), indigenous to North Arabia, evidencing weak but increasing social complexity through the Early and Middle Bronze Ages.”

Further excavations across Arabia will provide more details about the timing of this transition and the accompanying changes in societal structure and architecture, say the authors.

Scientists recently showed the presence of human activity in the UAE in the Bronze Age. Teams from Khalifa University of Science and Technology and the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi used ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to create an AI model replica – which showed that the area featured circular tombs dating to the Bronze Age.