Geographical Setting and Background

The historic Buraimi Oasis is situated on the border between the United Arab Emirates and the Sultanate of Oman. It consists of six discrete date-palm oases now divided between the modern towns of al-ʿAin (UAE) and Buraimi (Oman) (Plate 9). The archaeology of the Buraimi Oasis is quite well-known, having been the subject of fifty years’ research. Al-ʿAin is now inscribed on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Although it has been occupied for at least five thousand years, permanent settlement in the landscape does not appear to have been continuous. It now seems that the Iron Age and Late Islamic periods represent peak occupations, with less intensive but still considerable settlement activity in the Early Bronze Age and Early Islamic period, and almost no evidence for occupation during the Late Pre-Islamic and Middle Islamic periods. Such settlement patterns can be interpreted as evidence for episodes of ‘bedouinisation’ and ‘sedentarisation’, in which societies occupying so marginal an environment adapted their subsistence strategies according to changing ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. This gives the pattern of human settlement in the Buraimi Oasis a cyclical character.

The ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors driving settlement cycles in the Islamic centuries can be identified in the historical sources and archaeological record. ‘Sedentarisation’ in the Buraimi Oasis was, in both the Early and Late Islamic periods, stimulated by Indian Ocean trade cycles. Although somewhat far from the coast, the Buraimi Oasis was influenced by the cycles of Gulf and Indian Ocean prosperity. This was because powerful regional dynasties based in central Oman, the Second Ibadi Imamate (c. 793–891) and the Yaʿrubids (c. 1624–1722) respectively, emerged in response to peaks in the Indian Ocean trade. Mercantile capital was invested in large-scale agricultural estates. The oasis landscape of Buraimi was a product of the organisational capacities of centralised states coupled with the windfall of booming maritime trade that made these states possible. A second wave of agricultural expansion began under provincial successor polities, those of the Bani Sama in the tenth century and Bani Nuʿaym in the eighteenth century, as the centralised states dissolved into dynastic infighting.