Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [83]
1994: Season three at Ubar. With the layout of Ain Humran in mind, it didn't take long for Juri to find a matching gate at Ubar. It was in the western wall, between Tower #5 and the Citadel. At least it once was. Only the outer doorjambs remained; the rest had collapsed into the sinkhole. In search of the missing gate, Juri and his students sank a three-meter-square shaft in the sinkhole's sands.
Digging back in time, they first made their way through sand mixed with animal droppings and bits of bedouin bowls. For the last fifteen hundred-plus years, nomadic bedouin had watered their camels and goats here. Otherwise, there were no signs of occupation. Then, from one and a half meters on down, Juris team unearthed, one by one, stones that in cut and dimension precisely matched the masonry of what remained of the gate above.
Below the masonry of the crumbled and fallen gate were fragments of jagged, raw rock, once the gate's bedrock footing. Farther down, Juri and his students sifted through sand containing fragments of ancient pottery and bits of flint, evidence of the site's long occupation before its collapse. In the stratigraphy of the sinkhole's sands, Juri proved beyond a doubt that a single violent cataclysm had led to Ubar's abandonment. The sands below the fallen gate contained evidence of long and meaningful settlement. The sands above the gate contained next to nothing.
Cross-section of the sinkhole
Unfortunately, further digging would almost certainly destabilize the sinkhole and precipitate a disastrous cave-in, and so it is that a significant portion of the fallen Citadel would remain buried.
Season three was to be the last at Ubar. The city would still have its secrets and enduring mysteries. Beneath the rubble, beneath the sands, there still could be—who knows?—inscriptions, idols, skeletons, even treasure. Which is, perhaps, as it should be.
***
1995: Season four, the last in the land of frankincense. Juri and his crew devoted their final season to a wide-ranging search for evidence of the presence of the People of'Ad in the Dhofar Mountains and on the shores of the Arabian Sea. His archaeological sequence for the region now lacked but a single horizon: the Bronze Age, which in that part of the world was 2350–1200 B.C. It was Airwork volunteer Sean Bowler who at Taqa, on the coast, found the first tiny evidence of that era: a single bronze fishhook. And it was student Jim Brake who hiked up a hill into a Bronze Age bonanza.
The main road from the coast up into the Dhofar Mountains passed a solitary spreading olive tree, unique in the surrounding broken-limestone landscape. A left turn at the tree led to a high desert valley where frankincense groves were still to be found here and there. We had driven this road dozens of times. We had stopped to examine and photograph the trees; we had watched as tribesmen had slashed their branches and harvested frankincense crystals. This final summer, something caught Juris eye. As usual, it was a rock, this one broken into three pieces. It was a monolith, a fallen pillar. Originally three meters high, it appeared to be funereal in nature, for it marked a burial site.
As Juri measured and photographed the pillar (and estimated its weight at five or more tons), student Jim Brake crossed the road and climbed to the crest of a low hill, only to come running back down. There were ruins up there; they went from hill to hill to hill. Jim had happened on, in Juris words, "a monster Bronze Age site."
Set on the banks of what were once three converging streams, site Hagif #240 rambled on for a good three miles. Judging from their foundations, the village's houses had been impressive, with entries flanked by rows of massive standing stones. Hagif not only proved to be