Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [67]
The second and third Discoverys caught up with us. How fortunate we were. Who, if anyone, had ever passed this way and gazed upon what lay before us?
With ease, we dropped down onto the valley floor. A mile farther on, juris voice came over the radio: "You know what you clowns just did?"
Ran answered, "No. We don't know what we clowns, as you call us, just did."
"You drove right through an encampment, that's what."
We stopped, and all walked back to where Juri pointed out a random assortment of rocks. "That? An encampment?" Ran asked, not at all convinced.
"Was once," Juri affirmed, as he began picking up and examining small stones. The first half dozen he threw over his shoulder, noting them to be worthless AFRs.4 But then he said, "Look here now, here you've got a potsherd, though not much of a potsherd." It was orange, badly worn. It was quite old, he thought, dating to as early as 1500 B.C.
Ran examined the shard and asked what other pottery had been found in the Rub' al-Khali. Juri hesitated, then answered, "There hasn't been any, really..."
"What?" Ran blinked. "So this is a first piece of pottery?"
Juri believed it was. Ran shook his hand, impressed that we had an archaeologist who was "not just another pretty face." Juri chuckled and pointed ahead to more rocks, laid out in a large rectangle. He walked through a gap that could have been an entrance and prowled about, looking for more pottery or other artifacts. There were none. He guessed that what he had found was the foundation of a brush corral, evidence that caravans had camped here.
We drove on to the far side of the valley, and on foot climbed the steep sand ridge we had spotted from the pass. We were rewarded with a panoramic view of the road to Ubar. The great track, as wide as a ten-lane freeway, emerged from under a line of dunes opposite us, crossed the valley, and was swallowed once again by the sands.
Long ago, before the road had been claimed by the sands, a great cloud of dust would have risen from the far horizon, sent skyward by hundreds upon hundreds of camels moving at once. Wary of marauders, outriders with long lances would have kept the animals in close ranks as they indignantly bleated and gurgled. They would have slowly approached where we stood and passed on by, bearing frankincense north to the great markets of the ancient world.
We camped by the Ubar road at the north end of the valley, at the edge of the L-shaped formation we had checked out on our reconnaissance, which had proved to be an ancient lakebed. Ron walked out across it and, with a hand auger, took a coring of sediments that could later be used to date when the lake had formed and flourished. His educated guess was that it had dried up sometime between 7000 and 8000 B.C.
Juri scanned the shores of the lakebed and wondered aloud, "If I came here to hunt and maybe fish, where would I camp?" "Higher ground," he answered himself, "where I could spot game and enemies." With that, he was off.
An hour later Juri was back, his every pocket clinking and bulging with rocks. No more than two hundred feet away, just out of our sight, he had found a large Neolithic (from 5000 B.C. on) campsite. He couldn't be sure, but it appeared to be divided by walkways. Scattered everywhere, broken and intact, were the utensils of Stone Age life, as many as ten thousand of them. Axe blades, animal skin scrapers, mauls, and arrowheads.
"But Stone Age," I wondered, "wouldn't that be..."
"Yes," he completed the sentence, "too early for what we're looking for."
As the moon rose and Mr. Gomez served us "Apricots, dried" and "Cookies, 2 choc, chip," we discussed the finds of the day and listened as archaeologist Juri and geologist Ron pieced together a rough chronology for the valley...
Perhaps seven thousand years ago, Neolithic hunter-gatherers had camped on a rise overlooking what was then a small lake.