>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. 
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>> Moderator: Our first presenter, Dr. Krista Lewis, is an associate professor of anthropology and chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She specializes in archeology of Southern Arabia and its relationships to the wider Middle Eastern and Indian Ocean regions. Dr. Lewis leads two major archeological projects in South Arabia, one in Yemen and one in Oman. In Oman, she directs excavations at the UNESCO World Heritage Land of Frankincense site of Al-Baleed. Her research engages issue of urbanism, food waste, resource extraction, craft production, trade, emerging globalization, multicultural interactions and sustainability from prehistory to the early modern period. Dr. Lewis holds a PHD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Please welcome Dr. Lewis.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Dr. Krista Lewis: Al-Baleed was a mercantile, administrative, and cultural center, and international port city with a local heart. This large walled city offers a window into the emergence of the globalized world that we live in today. Al-Baleed is a large and visually stunning archeological site stretching for over a mile along the Arabian Sea beach. Its history stretches from the Late Antique period to the Early Modern, and its transformations throughout that time have much to teach us about international commercial transactions and the cultural interconnections that generate and sustain them. And, we heard earlier about -- sorry, is this -- I hear myself loudly. We heard early from our speakers earlier, especially Dr. Genouer [assumed spelling] about some of the very early origins of globalization in this region. So, trade and interconnection have a very long history in this area, but Al-Baleed is a special place to look at the connections between these very ancient origins of trade and interconnection globally all the way up to the modern world that we live in today. So, there are many industries and products associated with the region during the height of Al-Baleed, including aloes, metals, beads, textiles, ceramics, fish, and the plant dyes indigo and madder. Most famously of course, Al-Baleed is well-known for having exported the regional specialties of frankincense and also Arabian horses. Even more importantly, a wide array of people and ideas from throughout the Indian Ocean region passed through the gates of the city. Just to give you a better idea of where we're talking about, I mean, you all know where Oman is, of course. But, note the southern Oman, the Dhofar region, which is really in the center of the Western Indian Ocean trade circuits. Moving, and I don't have a pointer to show you this, but maybe I could show you. The reason I show you this map is just to highlight briefly the type of geography we're looking at in southern Oman, and why it's special. Each summer the Indian Ocean monsoon brings rain that turns this ring of mountains, if you can kind of see with the pointer, green, a lush green, and provides the moisture that allows frankincense trees to grow in this region. So, frankincense is our only -- they're exploiting a very small area along the back slopes of the mountain. And, you need just a certain amount of moisture that comes from this Indian Ocean Monsoon. Notice also down here in this other box where Salalah is, this other area of green. In this view to the north, you can see part of the western end of the walled city of Al-Baleed and a closer view of that second area of green I pointed out. It's a lush tropical agricultural belt made possible by the runoff and ground water from those framing mountains and the Indian Ocean monsoon. Unlike much of Arabia which is famous for its deserts, Dhofar's unique environment makes it an ideal place to be able to found and feed a city. The agricultural products from Salalah today are most famously bananas and coconuts and other forms of tropical fruits. But, what's even more interesting, in the understory of that orchard zone, all sorts of plants and animals are being raised, so it's a really highly productive belt. So, a very special, special place. In this photo you also see the locations of the most common structures on the site of Al-Baleed. This is the impress -- there's the garden zone -- the citadel of Al-Baleed and associated large congregational mosque, which you'll see both of those later. Am I just seeing some of the other unexcavated building mounds in that [inaudible] site? I'll just go ahead while he gets those up. The work of a number of archeologists at Al-Baleed has established the basic sequence of occupation, which can be bracketed into subperiods which you'd be seeing now when the slides come up. Based on the visual architectural types, radiocarbon dates, stratigraphy -- okay, we're getting closer -- ceramic typology, coinage, and historic narratives. There you go. There's our phases of the city. So, from modest pre-Islamic origins, the town grew into a thriving city, experiences a series of political and economic developments and phases of reorganization, reconstruction, and expansion for well over a thousand years. So, although we have structural remnants and artifacts from Late Antiquity, what you see in the upper righthand corner that have been excavated at Al-Baleed, due to the intensive history of building and rebuilding at this site, exposure to these earlier materials are necessarily rather limited. In this example in the upper righthand corner, you see some Late Antique bezels and also some house walls which are buried meters below a mosque, which is also below another mosque. So, you can't just kind of remove all of these later periods to get down to the early. The photo at the bottom is the ground level view of the mosque you saw in the last slide. It was founded by or before about the mid-tenth century AD, and saw a series of remodelings over the history of the town, as most buildings did. This mosque had a flat roof, a central courtyard, a quart minaret, and an attached ablution facility in the back. Across the city, more than 50 other mosques have been identified, many small and square, most of which probably date between 1250 and 1400 AD. This citadel which you also saw in that overview shot, is the most prominent monument on site. Also has seen a series of rebuilds, enlargements, and increased fortifications from the tenth to the 16th centuries. It rose to at least four stories and had an interior courtyard. Iben Betutu wrote in 1340 AD that it was the residence of a sultan, highlighting Al-Baleed's importance as an administrative center for the region. The south-facing view, also the citadel, highlights the lagoon surrounding the site and its importance for defense as well as a source of fresh water for the site. So, those runoff coming from the mountains, across a lot of the Salalah Plain, you don't actually see the water. I mean, there are springs, but in a lot of areas you don't see the water, but right when you get to the sea where these drainages occur, you get these freshwater lagoons which have been important in settlement in Oman, you know, since deepest Antiquity, but certainly right up the period of use of this site. This is an artist's reconstruction of almost the same view and the lagoons around the site could also provide a route of transport by boat. Al-Baleed's most impressive defenses face the sea. The south city wall includes a series of red [inaudible] base massive towers, which you can see here, and also in all these views. But, up  close and an aerial view. 
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The city also has a number of monumental city gates as well as other less grand entrances placed around the city wall. There's also evidence for locations where boats moored for offloading and taking on goods and supplies. For example, the small gate, which seems like it's up in the air from the city wall shown here, probably had a wooden pier that you would step to reach the gate from. 
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The impressive archeological -- architectural features certainly speak to significant local political and economic power, but a really wide array of imported good excavated from Al-Baleed also provide evidence for its far-flung global connections. Ceramics, coinage, and a variety of other artifacts from Al-Baleed include material of the origins of Yemen and East Africa, from Egypt, northern Middle East and Persia, from India, wider South Asia, Southeast Asia and China. Glass and wood have also been found at the site from multiple origins across the Indian Ocean.
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In six seasons of work since 2013, my team has been working to add a new dimension to our knowledge of the site. Our research at Al-Baleed seeks to understand the daily activities of the people who lived and did business there, examining the patterns of urban life as they developed uniquely in Southern Arabia in the context of its far-reaching global trade connections. Our work focuses on two different sets of methods over a range of scales. One is very tactile, traditional excavation, looking at the spaces where people lived and worked, what they did, and who they were through the minute of their material cultural. The other dimension is high tech involving detailed mapping on the ground and from the air, as you see here, and then using the digital data gathered to create three-dimensional models. This image is of a model of the entire site created from a composite of air photographs taken with an unmanned aerial vehicle. It can be zoomed to a level where individual stones are visible. It's not easy to demonstrate that in a static slide show, but here's an example of one of the images and that's actually at reduced quality there. This is a funerary mosque in the middle of the site. You can zoom it in and see individual stones. You can clearly see the individual surviving graves, so this is going to allow us to make a very high quality map. This is false color elevation model and so it makes it a little gaudy, but this kind of visualization allows us to see beyond what can be discerned just from a photograph. We use image analysis to discern buildings, neighborhoods, courtyards, streets, and maybe even industrial areas in a way that's identifiable more than they are when you're actually on site, on foot on the ground. So, this is allowing us to make a better, more, I guess, analytical map of site and then also identify areas targeted for future excavation. It also allows us to know things about the site without excavation which is an important aspect of site preservation. How the city was organized is an important aspect of understand the life ways of its inhabitants. Note for example how, I'm not going to go too much into what you see here, but the western end of the site is much higher mounded than what you see at the east. I'm going to, instead of talking about our theories for the east and then move on for right now and show you this image, which is facing northeast to orient you, to bring you in closer to that high mounded western end of the site. You've seen it at a slightly different angle from before. And, this also brings us to the other [inaudible] of our current research project. So, the area we were excavating, this is before we started excavating, it's in this really strategic central part of the city between the citadel, which you see up here, and a major city gate of the site on the seaside. So, this is just another view looking the other direction or from one of the major customs areas of the site, to where the major mound is that we started working on, and it's close to the sea. So, what's interesting about this is you can hopefully see that in this area very high, multistory collapsed stone mounding here and an open major street or a courtyard. And, this mound that we're looking at faces directly down this street or courtyard towards the citadel. Up close, this is a mound prior to excavation and I just wanted to give you a bit of a glimpse of kind of what it looks like as things start to emerge underneath that. It's pretty dramatic. There's a lot of working through this rubble, but rooms and walls start to emerge. Our investigations are specifically designed to recover artifacts, spaces, and organic remains that look at daily life for the residents and the visitors to this port. Here's a map of what we have got here, so for scale these are five-meter squares, so we're looking at quite a large area. Our work has revealed two areas of two major building complexes. You can maybe see the different orientation of the walls in this area and this section. I know this pointer is not ideal, but these walls are running much more north, south, east, west, and these are at a bit of angle. And, there's a lot of rebuilds, as I've, it's kind of a theme when talking about this site, so it's not one coherent plan but we're looking at phases and phases of rebuilding and remodeling over time. For example, we can see things that used to be standard rooms get subdivided or walled off, people no longer want to use certain areas and they want to build on in others. These two buildings do have deposits that overlap in time, so at least in the latest phases of their occupation they may have been related as an extended family compound. This is an example, just to give you a glimpse of one of the rooms, all right? Note these two doors. Here's a door that hasn't been excavated. We have since -- since we've taken this photo, this room has been excavated as well. this is the same room, just a little more cleaned up, but you can see two entrance doors there, a hallway here. So, all of these are excavations in progress so you can sort of see deposits we're coming through. Okay, and this picture's going to illustrate that -- our evidence that this was a multistory building, right? So, here you have a major staircase. It's leading up to a mostly destroyed upper floor of the building. We do have portions of that upper floor, so in this photo you see a plaster floor upstairs being uncovered. That plaster floor is two and a half meters higher than the plaster floor that we found at the base of those stairs. So, we also have flooring in the room that I just showed you at -- almost identical within centimeters of the same elevation as the floor at the bottom of the stairs. So, we're able to identify certain living levels and certain floors of the building. Also, to kind of illustrate the architecture of the building, this partially excavated room, if you notice here, maybe you can just see a sort of strange marking that seems like it's in the plaster of the remnants, plaster of this wall. This is a door. So, we're just beginning to get in here. You just see the top of the door emerge, and this is one of those doors that was intentionally filled later on. I guess they, you know, didn't want to use this room anymore, it was getting dangerous or dank in the center of the building. I don't know. you can also see where this wall is broken and that to kind of illustrate is where the ceiling would have been for that room. We know things about how the ceilings were made and where they were because sometimes we find remnants of them and that's what you see in the other photo here. This person is brushing out basically the plaster that was left when the beam that was there rotted away from this part of the ceiling. So, that's when ceilings tend to collapse is after the beams rot, but sometimes we get these sort of negative casts. 
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So, here's another excavation reveal for you. Prior to excavation, the most north face of the structure was almost four meters high on very steep mounding. So, and, almost the same direction you can see after a season of excavation, we removed a lot of that. Now, it's here, waiting to be taken away, and you start to see a really -- building walls and different phases of occupation. To flip it around, on the same slope looking at it directly facing south. I'm not going to go too much into that especially because I don't have a pointer to really show you anything, but you have some very early walls built of a sort of larger, more -- a better cut monumental stone that we get in later phases. You can see where she's excavating and here in the middle, some intentional fill layers in between this level and the levels that are above. We also have -- this is a very interesting curved wall, almost tower-like. We're still working on trying to interpret that. 
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So, archeological knowledge must be constructed and strengthened by multiple related lines of evidence from production, distribution, and consumption contexts, analyzed across all these different scales from landscapes of regions to the city plans, the architecture, right? So, things down to small as microscopic, organic residues, or charred grains in a hearth. Archeologists most often are reconstructing patterns of life from artifacts such as you see here. I mean, small fragments of pots, glass, coins. In the next few slides, I'm going to show you just a few highlights quickly of some of the things that we've found in this building, in these two building, and what these artifacts kind of give you a glimpse of daily life. Sharing food, drink, and other consumable items as we all just did, it's an essential way that humans everywhere show their cultural identity, display their status, mark social events, enact generosity, and facilitate financial transactions. The greatest proportion of the artifacts found in our excavations are ceramics, bones, and other items that tell us about eating practices. A significant portion of those artifacts and organic remains are related to practices of hospitality, generosity, and sociality. So, the folks at this port may have been sharing their cultural way of life and their eating with other people and I think that we're getting towards the level of analysis is still ongoing where we can start to pick out that there are African types of pottery and food items, there are Indian types of pottery and food items. There are certainly local, and so we're really interested in this sort of multiethnic identity of the port, and was it place where people -- where we can really see people getting along and, you know, making relationships, and generating these kind of economic transactions. Some other social activities we see evidence of include games, game boards, they chewed beetle nuts in the very latest phases of the city, tobacco pipes start to emerge, so they're smoking tobacco. We also have instruments, so music is something that, you know, we would know should be a part of a life in a city and people going, enjoying time together and food. But, we have some actual evidence and clearly a sort of a wind instrument, the bone recorder or flute, some pieces of inlay you see. These are inlay possible from a stringed instrument. I can't prove it, but there's some interesting wear along this. If someone is an expert in ancient instruments wants to have a look, that'd be great. We also have a pick that might be a pick for a lute-like instrument for picking the strings. 
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They were all found close by one another, too, so that's interesting. Maybe sort of a musical section of the building. Oil lamps, another interesting piece of material culture that sheds light on an everyday reality of life in the city. Most of the oil lamps are small like these made of simple, locally made terracotta ceramics. However, we also found this much more elaborate star-shaped lamp. This is quite lovely, made of a soft soapstone, which is not found locally in Dhofar. Evidence for this and also the other lamps that, you know, tell us that it was actually used for an oil lamp are the burn points which I've kind of highlighted on this upper photo. Each point had a wick and a point of light. The lamp was made to be suspended by an iron pin or a chain through a central column. So, with its multiple points of light it would have been rather like a small chandelier, quite lovely. This is just a historic lamp from Yemen. It's not star shaped, but just to give you kind of an idea of how it might have been hung, how it would work. Well, we also have some perishable artifacts, fibers such as this rope. This is a small fragment of cloth which is still under analysis, but my expert thinks it might be silk, beautifully painted wooden bowl fragment. 
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Another class of artifacts that gives us a really I think intimate view of people who lived at Al-Baleed is that of jewelry and personal adornment. Here are some examples. some of the many different types of beans that we find, sizes, colors, materials. Glass bracelets, we find a lot of glass bracelets. We find a lot of glass bracelets. So, bangle, shell bangle showed up earlier in a talk. These are glass. Perfume bottles, so your perfume bottle neck here and also some bottle fragments in this shot, all of these items are identified studied and then we want to put them back into the larger context of where they're found for analysis. So, I'm just going to bring you back to the excavation map again briefly to kind of talk about that. So, we want to look and we're still working on this analysis, but the statistical analysis of the patterns and how they relate to the architecture are helping us to understand not just what happened at the city or even just this structure, but down to the level of individual rooms and spaces. We mentioned that the musical instruments are coming from the same which was actually over here, the -- I just had a student who's just finished measuring a lot of glass bracelets and she's found that some of them are so small, the diameter, that they must have been worn by children, which is quite interesting. So, we're looking not at just an administrative building where, you know, men of the town came, but a family space, that we have, you know, the women and we have children. And, another thing that's quite interesting is almost all, I think except for one example of those child size bracelets all come from two rooms right over here. I don't know if we have a nursery. It's quite interesting. I want to just turn briefly to the building here, the second building that we started working in the east and we've been working west gradually over six seasons of excavation. And, so we're relatively new getting into the second building, which used to be, it's a courtyard, a large open courtyard with small rooms around it. And, I just wanted to point out some of these interesting features that we have. I just want to show you up close. So, this is another facet of private lives here in this courtyard, we have basins or, I think they're actually baths. So, we have these lovely plastered baths, they're small by our standards, but they're deep, kind of deep soaking tubs. But, they are slightly different in sizes. Here's one, there's another, there's excavators working on it. They have formal plaster drain systems, so they're very clean [inaudible] and had a kind of very intricate system of water and drains, which we know from elsewhere in the site, too, but this I quite interesting for this house complex. 
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For this excavation project we've also developed and deployed a unique comprehensive mobile digital data system. And, this not only facilitates rapid, comprehensive, paperless data collection in the field, but also relates, integrates, and tracks all of this excavation data from point of origin to analysis into long term storage. We want this to be efficient, but also to be able to share data more immediately, more fully, and more sustainably in a way that fits a Global Heritage site such as Al-Baleed, and hopefully this will have more and more spinoffs for interaction of visitors to Al-Baleed with the data in the future. Port cities are particularly dynamic places, both rooted in local patterns and cultures, but also the site for diverse multicultural interactions. They're places where not only trade goods and diverse people, but also a kaleidoscope of ideas, cultures, and ways of seeing the world come into contact. And, Al-Baleed's current role as an archeological park this is still as true as it ever was. Visited by diverse people from all over the world in a new phase of its occupation, the city is a place where be both look to the past and forge a new future. Bringing together the two facets of our project in excavation and digital recording, new  horizons of interpretation, scientific advancement, and tourism become possible. So, I just want to finish with acknowledging the many, many people that without which this project would not be possible, especially the folks from the Office of the Advisor, including Dr. Sunme [assumed spelling], who's here, and our team and everyone else who's working on the project. Thank you.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Moderator: Thank you, Dr. Lewis for a wonderful presentation. Our next speaker is Dr. Joy McCorriston. Joy McCorriston is a professor at the Ohio State University Department of Anthropology and director of the ASOM Project, Ancient Sociological Systems in Oman. She is an archeologist with 40 years of field work experience in the Middle East that includes Oman, Yemen, Jordan, and Egypt, and has been conducting research in Oman since 2009. Her collaborative research has discovered the earliest dates for domesticated cattle and sheep in Arabia, older than 8000 Cal BP, and established that agricultural technologist trailed pastoral adaptations by some 2500 years. In the fall, her team located an excavated monument and tombs of mutli-types as well as two rural settlements. Dr. McCorriston obtained her PHD in rural anthropology at Yale University. Please welcome Dr. McCorriston.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Dr. Joy McCorriston: Well, thank you very much. It is a great honor and a great pleasure to be here in such a wonderful setting and to see many familiar faces and many new faces with us today. I want to start by thanking, as our presenters have done before me, Dr. Deeb [assumed spelling] and the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center and the Embassy of Oman for hosting this and giving us a chance to provide something of a snapshot of some ongoing projects that are some of the more very visible and some of them are not so easy to see. And, I think some of our work is going to fall in the latter category. So, I'd like to talk about monuments which are visible, and mobility and pastoral territoriality, which is really behavior and as it takes some archeological work to tease that out and make that visible. So, those are topics that I would like to lead in today. 
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What I'd like to do with you in the next few minutes is to explore what we can learn about the dynamic lives of ancient safaris. And, if you walk away from this presentation with one simple idea, it is that despite these really magnificent ruins that we've seen from other parts of Oman and the spectacular site of Al-Baleed on the coast -- so here comes the idea, a you with me -- 95 percent of all Omanis who ever lived were mobile people and of those a very large percentage of them were pastoralists. So, although I will not be showing you spectacular objects, I could like to make the case this afternoon that it is important to consider the lives of these people who have left a lot less for us to look at. I will talk a little bit about pastoralism and archeology and some of these challenges, bringing that course to the case of Dhofar. And, in the spirit of the broader presentation today, although I am no expert on cultural tourism, I recognized that this is an important component of Oman's heritage and therefore I would like to offer a few very amateur thoughts about that. So, I hope you'll indulge me. Pastoralism in Dhofar, we now know, that it began about 8000 years ago. That's a long time. And, through that time, pastoralism has been a dynamic system. It has also been a long term adaptation, a way in which people have matched their social behaviors to the availability of resources, the distribution of resources, really developed a dynamic ecology. And, in that process over 8000 years, pastoralists have changed their environment even as they have fitted themselves to this dynamic changing environment. So, we talk about this really as a niche, a pastoral niche, the ancient safaris shaped the world and the world shaped them so that they really hung onto to pastoralism for a very long time. But, what we understand about pastoralism tends to be very much framed from what we can see of pastoralist behaviors today. Of the cultural anthropology and I've met a couple of you who are or have studied cultural anthropology, and it gives us a really great understanding of behavior, but it gives us a very static, sort of snapshot "I was there, I saw this for a year and wrote it up" kind of impression of what in Dhofar is really a very long term history. So, in Dhofar, a really very wonderful portrait of traditional pastoral lifestyles was presented by a German man named Jorg Johnson [assumed spelling], who was in Dhofar in the middle 1970s and wrote a seminal work called "Nomads in the Sultanate of Oman", which came out in 1986. We relied on that a great deal in trying to understand what traditional life was like. And, so this image before you, it shows arrows that map onto Dhofar and here I have to thank Dr. Lewis for giving us such a nice introduction so I don't need to tell you about the monsoon. But, this maps a kind of 1970s mobility pattern onto that landscape. And, so the small sort of radius around a certain point is documenting, meant to document the mobility of the traditional cattle herders in the mountains who extensively relied on a grassland plateau which is very narrow actually. It's only in some places a few hundred meters wide. And, these longer arrow map a mobility and transhumance of cattle herders back and forth across the mountains into the interior and from the coast. This is the ethnographic present. One thing we've been doing as a team is trying to look at the dynamics of that environment, which is also not static and I don't think that comes as a surprise to anyone in this room to realize that environments change. Ours is changing today. What has been learned very recently by some of the botanists from the Oman Botanical Garden and some earlier surveys is that the grasslands on that plateau, which provide this critical resource for cattle eating -- excuse me, for grass eating cattle, those grasslands are anthropogenic, meaning that they were made by burning off the cloud forest. And, that anthropogenic creation of grasslands is in the botanical world a fairly recent phenomenon. We don't need to get into how recent here, but what it does tell us is that there is change and that the change is part of that pastoral niche creation that I was talking about, niche construction. So, the project that I've been working with most recently is interested in trying to understand what those changes looked like over time and how people engaged with this changing landscape. One thing that we know about the changes in rainforest is that those changes not only happen on the plateau, and so this image shows you, I'm sure you've gathered by now, you can see grasslands on the plateau, and there's very, very sharp and abrupt transition to these steep slopes where the cattle don't graze as much and you still have tree cover from that Anglaises [phonetic] Forest. When you remove the tress from the grassland on the top, it has a spatial effect. Those monsoon clouds that Dr. Lewis talked about don't penetrate as far, they're not drawn into the interior and so it means that the vegetation way deep into the Nedjid's changes and we heard this morning from Dr. Asalami [assumed spelling] about the changes in the Nedjid and how we recognize those are important and deep prehistory. But, those cycles may have been changing in smaller cyclical events over time. So, we are very interested in pursuing that. And, in pursuing the behavior and adaptation of those many, many people who were pastoralists in ancient Oman. Okay, a little bit about pastoralists and archeology, and I'm showing you a picture of a village in Syria. This is the only picture that is not of Oman, but I have a reason for doing this. This picture is a village that's made of mudbrick. When these houses fall down after about 25 years, the mudbrick crumbles into mud, or dry dust if you're in Mesopotamia. And, it seals in and holds down all kinds of garbage that people leave behind, broken pottery, pieces of bone, bits of copper, all kinds of things that can tell us about the ways people lived. Pastoralists don't live like this. They mostly don't settle in built houses. They move around with their animals because the animals need to move on once they've grazed grass, meaning that we don't have the kind of site formation for ancient pastoralists. So, archeologists looking for a site will drive around and they'll see something really big and they'll say, "That's great." And, they'll learn about five percent of the people that ever lived in Oman, which is wonderful, but we have less of a record of the lives of other people and therefore it's harder to understand their behavior. So, places like Sumhuram in Dhofar on the coast, you know, we've also heard about it as Khor Rori, Al-Baleed, the Oasis of the North with the al Falaj, very highly visible. But, very few of the populations ever lived in there places. The material of -- the material culture of pastoralists is typically light, sparse, and often organic. 
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Now this is something that we can be grateful to cultural anthropologists for, again, because we can see how pastoralists live in the modern day. And, being mobile people they don't carry one of those great big, heavy, Indus water jars or whatever they had in them that is going to be really tough to lug around and if you drop it it'll break. Pastoralists tend to make things out of leather, out of wood, out of basketry, out of leather-lined basketry if you want to boil milk. They tend to use things like feathers and dyes and thatch to make shelters. So, my point is that these things decay. And, so there is without good site preservation, there's not a lot for us to find. So, why is she doing this, you're wondering. Here are the problems. Pastoralists move around a lot so the sites are very ephemeral, they aren't these big, deep installations with a lot of labor to build really solid, lasting walls. They don't practice agriculture, at least they did not in Dhofar, and that makes them very special in the world of pastoralists. But, they don't leave a lot of plant remains for us to understand what they eat in the plant world. They don't want to kill off all their animals. This is not, you know, the butcher's shop. These animals are precious and so they are conserving them and using them for milk and only killing them occasionally on special occasions. So, we don't see a lot of animal bone from these very ephemeral sites. They're very mobile, so they're not carrying a lot around and what is is light, flexible, tends to be organic. They tend to have a tribal social identity for long periods of time. So, it means that who they see themselves as being is not really determined by how much gold they have or how big a house they have or how much wealth they've accumulated in terms of solid things. They tend to have other ways of identifying their relationships to each other as social groups. And, they have very low population densities compared to, say, a place like Al-Baleed. This makes it difficult as archeologists to figure out what to do. It's really very hard with this lack of information even to look at the sites that are available and to understand the reuse of the sites. So, it's hard, but what I want to do now is talk about the case of Dhofar and talk about what we can learn about these very important people who were the backbone of Oman's long term heritage one might say. These image -- I lied, actually -- the image on the, let's see, it would be your left, is not from Oman, but it is an image of a very widespread Bronze Age tradition of depicting pastoral peoples. And, it comes from fairly nearby. It's an Arabian find and it shows the very prominent dagger. And, sometimes we do find these markers of social identities on the righthand side is a blade from an Omani tomb which actually was excavated by two of our speakers this morning, Michael Harrower and Kimberly Williams. And, one of the things that interesting about this is it came out of a Bronze Age tomb and the edges are rolled. This was not meant to be used. This dagger had these finely blunted edges. So, it was probably worn, a very prestigious object of identity, but not really meant to be drawn and used to kill anything. Other ways pastoralists were visible in archeology include sites. They leave hearths, some of that has charcoal that can provide dates. They clear vegetation, they move stones around, they drag them to hold down tents, they drag them to hold down animals, to corral animals. They put up little platforms to stick bedding on top of to keep it dry. We see graffiti and bedrock mortars, enclosures, all kinds of things that are left in the landscape. The other thing that they leave behind, and this is particularly important in Dhofar is territory markers, and we see some on the hill here, right along there. And, I believe you've seen some important tombs on the hilltops earlier in this session. So, these are territory markers, they often appear at places or near places where there are good sources of water. They may mark routes or hunting blinds. They may mark other well sources. And,  my teams have been examining these for a number of years looking at them both in their spatial and chronological dimensions. Here you can see a platform or cairn. This is not one that we excavated, but it conforms to a type of Bronze Age cairn that we see there. This is a typical monument of about 2000 years ago, a very different style of monument but nevertheless a very small scale investment of labor in building these stone monuments. And, here's a boulder that has been elaborately marked on the surface with foot petroglyphs of footprints, maybe snakes or winding water, some texts in a Dhofari script. So, important points, shaped and marked by pastoralists moving through this landscape. We've also been exploring the chronology of these monuments, looking at burials in tombs and also looking at the kinds of, not along the styles of the monuments, but the different periods in which they are excavated. So, here they can see, again, Dr. Kimberly Williams excavating a tomb in Dhofar. The result of this work over a number of years has been to recognize the spatial distribution of a number of small monuments, but also differences in style and in chronology. And, so we have been able to look into all these different types and I won't go into what they are, but I'd also like to point out that we have developed a dataset that provides something of a pattern that's pointing to some kind of dynamism. So, I talked about pastoralism being dynamic. We can see these markers are changing in style through time. We also can see that there seem to be some pulses of when things are being marked and territory perhaps is being expressed and when there seems to be a more open system. So, this pattern is the result of a number of years of work. And, just a few images of some of these structures. This is a view of a platform structure from the Neolithic period. We have not found burials in this particular style of platform. That's a hypothesis to be tested further. I think we haven't excavated as many as we might like to. But, for the moment the evidence that we do have seems to point to some kind of commemorative event, something happened big, a big feast, a big gathering of people. we have some data from outside of Dhofar that kind of point to this sort of interpretation. And, then a monument was put in place to kind of commemorate that large gathering. Other kinds of monuments later in time include tombs which still are markers. And, these are placed very high, very visible. They seem to tie people not so much to the memory of a gathering and a social community but to a lineage and a genealogy, the memory of who was in this tomb, when that person was buried, when that tomb was last visited. So, we see more of a chronological depth to the memories around these monuments and less of a large-scale gathering. So, we see some -- perhaps some change in the behaviors of pastoralists through time. And, this may, in fact, be the beginning of these genealogical structures that shape the social identities as tribes. One thing that the project has been working on recently is there are some settlements. So, I spent a few minutes telling you how difficult it is to reconstruct pastoral lifestyles from settlement, but we actually do have some. And, it really surprised us that these settlements were as robust as they turned out to be. So, we find circular, little circular structures with some well-built construction, kind of a bee hive corrivalled vault to them, four layers of floors.
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So, people would live in them, they'd toss down garbage, they'd put down more paving stones in the base, they'd live in them again, and we find three or four episodes. Sometimes the ground surface on these built up so much that you would have to walk down and stoop to get into these earlier ground surfaces where these habitations had been built. And, here you can see in the background of several of the more recent team members, a site that is in kind of a basin or bowl and has a number of these stone structures, but they don't look like much on the surface. In fact, if you didn't know what you were looking for you would think they were maybe one stone deep and there was not much to do there. So, again, they're not visually deeply impressive, but they do archive information about an important constituent of Oman's heritage. Here's a map that we may -- I'm just showing you this because I want to impress you with how wonderful my mapping team. And, so I don't personally take a lot of credit for this, but you can see that they've gotten a digital elevation model out of some remote imagery. In this case we just flew a kite and then they've gone around and mapped using an instrument, the little corrals and cell structures, the little buildings attached to those corrals. And, you can see there's a number of cairns and platforms in this area as well. So, chronologically and spatially this is quite a complex little site, which I just showed you doesn't look like a whole lot on the surface. Some more images from that site, just giving you a sense of the -- what the interiors of some of these structures here, quarter has been excavated out. Here we have a half with a nice entrance way, so you can see there's some depth. So, we're able to find things in those structures like the occasional grinding stone, there's a lot of bone in there, gives us a sense of what people were eating and what was important to them and their herds. So, going back to that gap, I just wanted to remind you that we have now both settlements and we have small scale monuments that are telling us about people's access to resources, the places that were important to build in, to stay in, to assert some kind of visual presence even when they were not actually present because they were wondering with cattle to temporary grasslands or forage areas. So, we're actually now testing this map, this pattern with a model in which territoriality behavior plays a role, in which we are looking at the shift from perhaps an open property regime which would be in these periods when we know there are lower populations elsewhere in the Arabian Peninsula. And, we would think there would be an open -- more of an open availability of resources and high mobility going back and forth to resources. As populations grow in better times, perhaps with the -- perhaps with concentration around resources, there would be lower mobility and in between trees might take over in abandoned grassland areas and leading to a population decline in some of those areas and a return of grasses. So, the project going forward is really testing this idea of there being a dynamic system that couples the human behavior, the human social dynamic and mobility with changes in the environment with the shift between anthropogenic grasslands and the recovery of tress in between . So, we're really interested in that long term dynamism and as I've tried to show you  the low term changes where people come back to using monuments over and over again to express their presence in a region, but doing so in some very different ways, kind of shaping monuments differently, relating to them differently as tombs or as platforms and gathering places. So, I said I would end with a few implications for cultural tourism in Oman. Bear with me, the picture you see here is the picture of the interpretation of these very important people in Oman. This is the site that tourists are going to come to see, and you can see, well, it remains open for development. Pastoralists were the majority of people who lived in Dhofar. They did leave materials. They did leave material remains all over the place. And, yet, there is no really good public interpretation of ancient pastoralists that's focused on a site where people actually were. You can go out and look at these monuments but they don't have interpretive signs. They don't have an interpretive visitor center, they don't have pathways to lead people around them and help people to understand how they actually fit into a landscape and a dynamic landscape, how people have shaped the Dhofar that we can visit and see today. So, I would argue from my very naive and amateur research position, as a non-specialist in cultural tourism, that there is work to be done in cultural tourism and that this is an important and overlooked part of Oman's heritage. So, I want -- this is my final slide. I want to thank the tremendous support we've had over the years, and most importantly I'd like to thank al of the members of the teams who have worked on various aspects of this project who this would not have happened without you. Thank you very much.
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>> Moderator: Thank you, Dr. McCorriston, for your presentation. Our next speaker is Dr. Michael Harrower. Michael Harrower is an associate professor of archeology at John Hopkins University. His research is focused on Southern Arabia since 2000, where he began his field work in Dhofar in 2009 and 2010. He continues work in Oman today as the director of Archeological Water Histories of Oman or ARWHO. He is a specialist in satellite imagery mapping and his research has been funded by agencies including NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Archeological Institute of America and National Geographic. Dr. Harrower obtained his PHD in anthropology from Ohio State University. Please welcome Dr. Harrower.
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>> Dr. Michael Harrower: Okay, thank you. Well, I'd like to start off by saying thank you very much to the Library of Congress and to the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center for organizing. It's a wonderful opportunity. I'm so pleased to be here and learn about all the excellent work that people are doing. I just returned from Cairo yesterday, so I'm totally on the wrong time zone. So, I've never dozed off during one of my own talks, and I thought it was probably not a good time to start. So, I thought I'd use the lectern. I would just start off by saying, you know, if we were to go out on the street in Washington and ask somebody about ancient Egypt and whether ancient Egypt was important, there would be no debate, right? Everyone would say that there's a wonderful archeological history in Egypt and it's of global significance. But, there's less recognition really of the tremendous work, much of which has been presented today, about Oman, the new discoveries, the grand history, and the really critical role in the ancient world that Oman played. So, I'm going to speed through today to give you kind of a little bit of a window into work that I've been involved with over the past 20 years in Yemen and in Oman and including a kind of a focus on my recent project that concentrates along the border with the Emirates up here where you see Bat on the map shown here. So, my most recent book I kind of took a look at the long term role of water in the history of ancient Yemen and compared that to the role of water in American history and the settlement of the United States and the American West. And, despite these really obvious differences that we see, you know, in culture and language and clothing in so many aspects, I think what's really striking is that there are some broad underpinning similarities between parts of the world that we think of us as being so very different. And, this is where Oman really to my mind is one of the most important countries in the world today. If you think about the issues that we face in terms of cultural understanding, cultural interchange, war, conflict, climate change, the real answers to a lot of those I would say, I really try to argue this in my book, involve building a mutual sense of understanding between people of the world, right? A common understanding of language, culture, history, by which we can build some shared values and understanding of how to proceed in a cooperative way to address these. And, this I something that Oman has played a tremendous role in the world, and really is a model of cultural and public diplomacy. So, that is something I'd really like to highlight. So, let's speed through here and I'm going to start off with really giving you a lightning-fast introduction to some of the periods we're dealing with here. So, I spent a couple of years working in Dhofar and I'm going to return to Dhofar and kind of give you some touch stones to think about. But, most recently I've been directing a project called the Archeological Water Histories of Oman or the ARWHO project. And, this has been funded over the last three years by NASA involving archeological survey or basically exploration. And, so as part of this exploration we really touch on all sorts of different time periods, right? It was mentioned earlier this morning that really some of the earliest history of human ancestors in Oman goes back more than a million years ago, even two million years ago in the Paleolithic period. Then we arrive into the Neolithic period where the development of pastoralism, agriculture, shows up, and this is a really critical, interesting topic for archeologists. Why did the first people engage in agriculture and pastoralism? Then we get into this Bronze Age period, much of which you've seen. Some of the hallmarks today have Phi [phonetic] period tombs, Umamnar [phonetic] period settlements and towers, and the Wadi Suq period. The Iron Age I'm going to touch on a little bit in terms of the production of metal and the international trade that goes on in that period. And, then of course, the Islamic period and the crucial role played by the political economy and circumstance at that time which leads to the impressive and rapid spread of Islam through Arabia and throughout the world. So, about ten years ago when I started working in northern Oman, you know, we charted out a massive area to kind of look at. And, today there's many, many projects working in this area, Polish teams, Dutch teams, American teams, Japanese researchers. So, it's really exciting to see really the knowledge of Oman and the history of Oman change very rapidly. In addition to sort of broad scale exploration, driving around, leaving no stone left unturned, using satellite imagery, talking to local peoples, we also do a sort of statistical survey and on the righthand side here, you can see these little colored lines represent my teams walking and surveying in a systematic way on the ground to document everything we find in terms of the archeological history. One of the most interesting sites we found, Abu Sue, is north of the town Yanqul in which we are often centered. And, I was there just recently with a French archeologist, Dr. Remy Crusard [assumed spelling], who's one of the leading experts in lithics of the Arabian peninsula, and I often get asked, you know, like what's it like to discover something transformative? And, this is really an example of that because I reached down into the sand, picked up this stone tool, handed it to Remy and said, you know, "What is it, Remy? What is it?" And, he immediately, I could see the look on his face, he got very excited because this was a levawa [phonetic] point, something he spent really his career studying. So, it doesn't look like much to the untrained eye, but we know these are about 75,000 to 100,000 years old and really paint a picture of some of the early people that are establishing themselves in the Arabian Peninsula. Other stone tools that get people really excited include façade, projectile points like this one. If we think of the cusp of how hunter-gatherers transform into pastoralists these are sort of centered about 8000 years ago during that period. And, we really -- the people that produced these are very, very mysterious to us because we don't have, as Dr. McCorriston mentioned, really rich evidence from settlements that would tell us about the lives of people that produced these, but they are found widely throughout Yemen, throughout Oman, Dhofar, and likewise. Then we get into the Neolithic period, so these are found at a site called Wadi Olathli [phonetic] near Yanqul, a very, very large Neolithic site. So, a couple of hectares, a couple of football fields in size and all sorts of types of stone tools that we can recognize form the Neolithic period. You heard about quite a lot today the work in Dhofar and in other parts of Oman having to do with Bronze Age tombs. So, these are what we might call in some parts of Oman Hafeet tombs or Hafeet-like tombs, and these are excavations shown here in Dhofar led by Dr. McCorriston and skeletal analysis done by Dr. Kimberly Williams of these types of tombs. And, they're so very interesting to us because we find tombs of this genre throughout the Arabian peninsula, even up into the Sinai, throughout Yemen and Oman and they fall in the range of about 5000 years ago to a little bit younger in large numbers. This is another tomb from Dhofar that we found particularly intriguing because it falls in this range of roughly 5000 years ago. We found a couple of these tombs in, one of them, the first one discovered was found in Wadi Halluf and that's how it get's the name Halluf tomb. And, one of the interesting things we found in this tomb is a dagger that actually Professor McCorriston showed you some slides on, and really thoughtful archeologists debate the, you know, the chronology of this tomb, the chronology of this dagger, how did this dagger wind up in this tomb? Oman is really famous for copper production so at the very early end we're looking at about 3200 BC when Hafeet tombs start to show up and we find copper production happening and these are really exciting for us to think about, you know? Where did the copper from for that dagger? How did it find its way into that tomb. During the Umamnar period we find some really impressive towers developed and there's been a lot of work on these. There's more than 60 or 70 towers been documented by Dr. Charlotte Cable, Chris Thornton, and others throughout Oman's history. This one is one we worked on quite extensively and what's intriguing, all those this is 180 kilometers from the coast, it's got a pictograph on it of a boat. And, we're really interested to think about how the people of this inland area were in connection with the coastline, were trading, were domesticating animals and whatnot. And, these tombs are closely associated with water, and this is sort of a hallmark of tombs and towers. 
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This is a well in the middle of this tower. So, we did quite a bit of work reconstructing the landscape around Yanqul. This is satellite imagery and topographic data and this orange areas here are showing the vegetation around Yanqul and the Date Palm Oasis. This is some of our publications of that work;. And, we did some three D modeling. This is something that archeologists have just really taken up with a tremendous passion in the past few years because this technology has become vastly less expensive. And, so we did some three D modeling of this tower to try to understand its construction. We did a whole bunch of on the ground modeling. So, one of the things we realized is this town was constructed by blocks that are almost as big as one of the tables up here of the -- at the podium. And, they're just enormously heavy and it's so interesting to think about how these were moved, but one of the things that's an advantage to us is these blocks are so heavy, excuse me, that most of them that are fallen over didn't get very far away. So, all these little black dots are blocks that we mapped on the ground to try to understand how this tomb over the time, over the past 4500 years has deteriorated and then I had some colleagues, an architect, and students reconstruct this using the drawing of the tomb in sort of a digital game of Lego here putting all of these little blocks, measured blocks back to try to reconstruct the height of this tower, which we estimate stands about eight meters tall. Nearby, returning to the site of Abu Sue, we found some other interesting things from this Umamnar Bronze Age period. We were there in 2012 and documented some Umamnar tombs. These are not something that the untrained eye would get excited about. Really if you weren't carefully looking walking right over top of this without really noticing it was significant. And, one of the things that really was touched on throughout a number of the talks today is the challenges archeologists face in Oman and really around the world, sort of trying to preserve and protect cultural heritage, right? And, so quite unfortunately despite our efforts, these -- number of tombs in this area were bulldozed, right? And, so a big part of our work is sort of public outreach or, you know, education having to do with the archeological history. And, the, you know, development in Oman is proceeding at such a rapid pace, right, that one of our challenges is just reaching out to local communities and trying to work very hard at sign boarding and protecting some of this material. And, these are some of the objects that came out of these tombs, right? So, really some tremendous material. This is some soft stone vessel pottery, shell, and other materials, and it's a running battle really to preserve and save some of this that we're working very hard on with the Omani Ministry of Heritage and Culture. One of the things Oman is really famous for, of course, is copper and bronze production. So, the Bronze Age and later, not surprisingly, is known for bronze. This shows you some raw copper, but usually most of the copper in Oman comes in the form of copper in minerals that are found throughout Oman. And, while today mining companies and modern production of copper is in search of big commercially viable deposits, right? They're not interested in small quantities of copper, but something we can really develop as a commercial enterprise. Archeologists on the other hand are interested in the really smaller quantities of copper that people have been exploiting and trading throughout the Middle East for at least 5000 years. And, a large part of our work with NASA satellite imagery includes work with hyperspectral imagery from this satellite here called Hyperion. That is akin to having 240 different pictures of different wavelengths of light on the ground. So, this can tell you a lot about what you're looking at in terms of the geology. And, so while we've long known for a very long period of time the geological formations in Oman that yields copper, what is much more challenging to do is to try to pinpoint where the copper bearing minerals showing on this map, how they're distributed and how people were using them. And, one of the things we've really learned is that it's not only the presence of copper. But, it's also the presence of water to grow the food, to supply the people doing this copper production, and also the presence of trees to produce the charcoal to smelt this copper, right? So, as was mentioned earlier today, the search of trees to make the charcoal is very, very important from the Bronze Age and especially into the Iron Age where you have hundreds of thousands of tons in the Iron Age in Islamic period of copper slag being produced in Oman. One of the sites that was discovered a handful of years back that's really critical in this regard in revealing just some of the astonishing things going on in terms of copper production is Saffah [phonetic] or Ugdat Al-Baqarah and this is about 30 kilometers into the desert. Was discovered on the edge of the Rubahali [phonetic] in the desert sand dunes and there's hundreds and hundreds of furnaces or pits being identified first by Italian research and the Ministry of Heritage and Culture in this area and hundreds and hundreds of bronze objects like this dagger shown here. A lot of these are now -- a potion of these are on display in the new Oman National Museum. And, one of the really intriguing questions about this material and these images are from the archives of the Oman Ministry of Heritage and Culture, is just the impressive quantity of different material, daggers, axes, bowls, and other material that came out of this area and been subject to work by German, Italian, and variety of different international teams. And, so I'm really indebted to them for their impressive work on this material. And, this is really akin, when I think about explaining this to my students, I oftentimes say this is akin to being, you know, camping out in the desert, and let's say or argument's sake, you were camping out in the desert and you had a thousand iPhones. In a sense this was what an iPhone is to us now. It's something incredibly valuable, right? An d, if you have had, for argument's sake, a thousand iPhones, I don't know how you'd have a thousand iPhones, but say in a cardboard box or a backpack or you knows. You had a thousand iPhones. You were camping out in the desert and somehow you were forced to flee really quickly. Maybe there's a sandstorm or you were attacked and you had to run away really fast, right? What most likely you do is go back and find that material or whoever attacked you would want to keep it or you would go back the next week or month or a period of time later and retrieve it, right? For some strange reason, in this case, that never happened and this perhaps was buried deeply in a sandstorm that maybe transformed the landscape so dramatically that people were unable to find the spot. Or, for whatever reason this material wasn't retrieved from this desert area. So, our work at the site is really focused in on satellite imagery. We're using Japanese, German, Canadian radar. We're using GPR, ground penetrating radar, to try to understand where people were living at this site, where were they getting water, why were they out here in the middle of the desert. The really impressive advantage of satellite radar and radar in general is it has the capability to penetrate beneath the ground. So, especially in really dry sand, radar waves can penetrate very, very deeply and give you an image of what's underneath the ground without having to dig. So, we had a team out in 2017 at Saffah, doing magnetometry and ground penetrating radar in the area that was documented previously by an Italian team. And, we've documented many, many of these furnaces or pits that weren't visible on the surface. So, there's hundreds and hundreds of them on the surface. There's hundreds and hundreds more of them -- underneath the surface of the ground and these bowtie type of reflections are what you get when radar waves go down into the ground and bounce back up. The other thing we noted is that you think, well, this is in the middle of the desert sand dunes. Where in the world could they be getting their water? One of the things we recognized in GPR and in satellite radar is there is actually a drainage going right through the middle of this site. Not now, but 3000 years ago when this site was occupied, there was water and probably tress and that may give us a clue to why they're out here. Maybe they're using these pits to produce charcoal that is used in the smelting or the melting or the production of this material. And, we dug a number of different trenches in these red polygons in early 2018. These are examples of the pits that we see in radar, quite modest, small, little pits. These are four by four excavations, and we also did a trench across the drainage that we identified, the sort of natural small stream running through the site and this is flanked by pits. 
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And, what's really interesting, too, is this drawing shows a cross-section of this channel is that there's pits there that are covered over by water flow and by some of this water laden sand. So, we know that not only there was water flow before people arrived there but actually there was water flow in that desert area even after or intermittently while people were burning charcoal or using furnaces or involved in either massive scale food production or metal production. We're also collaborating with Professor Kneuer [phonetic] that he gave you a wonderful presentation earlier today on beads. So, this is a bead we retrieved from the surface. We're very interested in the trade connections not only of where the bronze material comes from but whether we can situate the location of the carnelian used to  produce this bead and another one like it that's now in the national museum. Another really critical piece of work we're working on in terms of trade is a site we discovered in 2015 called the Ker Al-Shamus [phonetic] and this was in close cooperation with the ministry of heritage and culture. This is showing you this small village on a very tight bend in a wadi. And, there's some of the buildings here, and what this site is really amazing and important for is being the first discovery of soft stone chloride vessel production known in Oman. So, in fact known in Arabia. So, prior to this time, we know that really amazing material made of out this soft stone, you know, the layman's term in English for this is soapstone and it's almost got a soft, soapy feel. And, we know in in the Bronze Ave and Iron Age, Iran was a major center point of production of really glorious vessels, many of them now in museums, produced out of this type of stone. Archeologists have known for decades that the geological conditions are right for the mining of this type of material. But, prior to the discovery of Ker Al-Shamus, we never found evidence of people actually making this stuff and trading it on. So, while these pictures look really rough and none of this material is really going to find your way on display, you know, on a prominent display in a museum, these are really scientifically so interesting to us because they're roughed out, early shapes of vessels that were carved into elaborately decorated examples. So, we're starting to learn about the geological knowledge of these ancient people, how they're mining this, chiseling this, polishing it down, working it, smoothing it, shaping it. And, we've got a paper, another paper just in the final stages of revision where we used Hyperion hyperspectral satellite imagery to go searching for the source of the mine that was used to collect this material and we've got some really interesting analysis showing that a few, about an hour's walk away, up a very steep mountainous wadi, people were mining and collecting this material. Coming back to Dhofar, really one of the things that Dhofar is really famous for are these triliths that were also touched on earlier today. We've learned a little bit more about these, but they really remain one of the most mysterious small-scale monuments in Arabia and these are sort of centered in Dhofar, right? The densest, most abundant examples of these are in Dhofar. There's quite a number of them in eastern Yemen in Hadhramaut, there's some in Charkia [phonetic], there are some -- there's a handful of ones in northern Oman. And, we know that likely the people that are involved in the early camel caravans and trade routes and networks that connect the Arabian Peninsula are stopping at these or involved in some kind of use of these early monuments and probably that may include trade in frankincense. And, many of you might not know that there's a running rivalry between Canada and Oman for the most valuable form of tree sap. So, Canada of course, the home of maple syrup, has, you know, a really lucrative trade in maple syrup. But, in ancient Oman, it's number one in terms of the trade of this impressive form of tree sap, frankincense, that led to the kingdoms and the civilizations becoming extraordinarily wealthy trading this throughout the world to Egypt, the Mediterranean, to the Roman world throughout this period of time. So, I'll conclude just with some acknowledgements, most prominently the Ministry of Heritage and Culture which has been so gracious to us in permitting and supporting our research. Professor McCorriston who was my mentor as a graduate student and has really played a tremendous role in sort of training and mentoring me throughout my career. Ohio State University, I really can't go on to thank enough the very large number of people that have been involved in this work over the years. And, the individuals with the Ministry of Heritage and Culture at John Hopkins University, of course NASA for funding support for this work. And, of course, the people of the Sultanate of Oman, which have been so tremendously friendly and gracious and welcoming us and helping us learn about the amazing history of this tremendous region. So, thank you very much.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Moderator: Thank you, Dr. Harrower, and indeed the whole panel, such wonderful presentations. We have a few minutes for some questions. So--
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>> Audience Member: Well, thank you all. That was really a very, very exciting panel. I have a question. Everyone has been speaking out the copper and copper smelting and the trade in copper. And, yet when one talks about material objects very little is said about any of them being made of copper. I'm wondering why, or in what form was the copper used in the region?
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>> Dr. Michael Harrower: Yeah, this is really one of the most fascinating aspects of Omani archaeology and Omani history being, you know, one of the ancient world's most prominent sources of copper. So, we know through an understanding of even modern copper mining and production in Oman today that the Al-Hajar Mountains are really a rich source of this material. How that originally gets started during the early Bronze Age is a matter of a lot of research and a lot of study. How people learned to, you know, create the furnaces and the temperatures to melt this, to alloy it together with other metals like arsenic and tin. And, so there's some tremendous research involved in that early study. We know that perhaps they were boring on some technologies that were used to make pottery in kilns, right, to produce the temperatures to fire pottery and maybe elaborated from that. Oman, as it was mentioned earlier, is really a center point of trade and interconnectivity, so they were drawing on interaction and knowledge and technology from a variety of different sources. But, it's an ongoing real mystery about where that technology and know-how originates and spreads. 
>> Dr. Krista Lewis: If I could just add one little point to that. If I understood the question, is why are the objects not made of copper? Copper is one of the constituents of bronze, so the copper was in the objects, but they had another level of the technology that is still being studied to transform that raw material into a harder material. When you alloy it it becomes much harder. 
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>> Audience Member: Yes, a question for Dr. Lewis. You had a illustration of numerous objects that have been on Earth, and one was a small brass coin with a square center, appears to be probably Chinese origin. Have you made a determination as to the date of this coin, the emperor of China that it represents, and any other significance it might have? 
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[ Inaudible ]
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>> Dr. Krista Lewis: Okay, that particular coin was excavated by one of the previous archaeologists at the site, so I'm actually not sure if that particular coin has a date. I mean, one of the challenges with all of the coins that are coming from this site is they're highly corroded, because they were right on the sea side. And, so the metal, which is often in bad shape as we've seen from archaeological sites, and this site is particularly damaged. So, it's really difficult to actually get, even once they're chemically cleaned, to be able to identify the markings on it. So, a lot of the coins are identified more based on their shape and general material, but the inscriptions are not always easy to read I guess. 
>> Moderator: Well, I have a question. From this panel and the previous panel, it's obvious that the world has been interconnected for quite -- for thousands of years. How typical is Oman for that region as far as being the cross roads of trade and so forth? Like, how does it compare to neighboring countries or neighboring--
>> Dr. Krista Lewis: A typical?
>> I mean, is it an extreme example or is it a--
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[ Inaudible ]
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>> Dr. Krista Lewis: I think I would answer by saying that we see -- we've seen a lot of traffic across different cultural groups. One of the things that has struck me, and I come back to my point about pastoralists being the majority of the Omanis who've lived, is that some of those sites that we're looking at show no evidence, or limited evidence, of interaction. So, I think it's very variable across the different populations whether they were on the coast or inland or mobile or settled. I think you would find a great deal of variability, as you would in some of the surrounding regions. Probably Dr. Kneuer could answer that about the Indus area as well. 
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>> Dr. Michael Harrower: Yeah, to sort of respond a little bit to that, I mean, in a contemporary world people are really interested in globalization, right? What are the forces that have created the interconnected world? And, we think of social networks and social media and the internet as interconnecting the world. And, in a different way that also happens in the past, right? And, archaeologists are also interested in ancient globalization and ancient social networks. Like, what are the forces early on that lead to interconnectivity up and down the gulf? What are the economic, political, religious forces that shape the ancient middle east, right? And, there's a tremendous amount to be learned, I think, about looking back at the time depth that archaeology can offer, right? So, rather than being just a Sunday afternoon pastime or something we could do for fun, and archaeology certainly is fun, it also has a more -- much more serious role to play in understanding geopolitics, right? And, in thinking about the lessons that can be drawn about the underlying causes of war and conflict, and the rise and fall of different geopolitical actors in the past. So, that I think is among the types of topics that really get archaeologists excited to think about what lessons can we learn about those sorts of patterns from the ancient past? And, there are indeed, you know, many, many insights to be drawn. 
>> Moderator: Thank you.
>> Dr. Krista Lewis: I could just pick up really briefly on what Dr. Harrower was saying, and just extend that point by saying, you know, while in some respects you could say that Oman is not unique in this, right? For some place to be connected globally to all these other places it means those other places have to be also in turn connected globally. But, I think what we're seeing with the increasing amounts of research that are showing the local specificity of those patterns, and who they're reaching, and who they're not reaching. Or, how maybe the effects of this global interconnection are reaching even to groups that are far from direct contact. In a way, what we're doing is helping to decolonize our scholarship, and think beyond the idea, that is rather old fashioned now, that certain central areas of the world were important, more powerful, and that other people were peripheral, less civilized if you will. And, I think this kind of more nuanced understanding of what was happening everywhere, and the really sort of dynamic way that people were engaging, or choosing now to engage with the people around them helps us, you know, in this -- you know, just follows what my colleagues were saying. Helps us understand also today's patterns, and warns us not to look at certain regions of the world and say, "You're not important. You're not connected. You're not in these patterns," because it's -- we're all interconnected, and understanding how that's happened in the past I think is -- definitely gives us a view to the future.
>> Joan Weeks: Welcome to our third panel today about the modern cultural tourism of ancient sites. What a wonderful concept. I hope by the end of this panel that we are all ready to do exactly that. Take our own tourism opportunities to visit some of these ancient sites. I know I'd love to do that, but it is a very delicate balancing act between cultural heritage, preservation of these fragile sites, and the promotion of tourism. And, this is something that the Omani government is dedicated to doing, and is trying to preserve this rich cultural heritage, but also make these fantastic sites available, because it is such a fantastic opportunity and builds knowledge and appreciation of the cultural heritage of Oman. So, I'm Joan Weeks, I'm head of the Near East section here at the Library of Congress, and it's my great pleasure to introduce this first presentation on frameworks for preservation, tourism, and relevance by Dr. Nathan Reigner. Nathan Reigner is a consulting social scientist and principal of Recreation and Tourism Science LLC. Dr. Reigner has collaborated with federal and state parks and forest agencies as well as NGOs in the United States and abroad. During his 12 years of parks research, Dr. Reigner has worked in more than 50 units of the national parks system. Additionally, he provides technical assistance on visitor use management to the nature reserve and natural park systems of the Russian Federation, public and private outdoor recreation areas in Iceland, and nature-based tourism destinations in the Sultanate of Oman. Dr. Reigner is 2018s Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center research fellow. He holds an MS in forestry from Richmond -- or, from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and his PHD in natural resources from the University of Vermont, Rubenstein School of Environmental and Natural Resources. Please welcome Dr. Reigner to the podium.
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>> Dr. Nathan Reigner: Thank you all for having me today. My name's Nathan Reigner. I'd like to thank her excellency, the ambassador of the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, the Library of Congress, for helping to make this conference possible. I have learned a lot today. I hope to continue to learn throughout the afternoon. And, I want to preface my remarks with the statement that I have not yet been to Oman. I am one of the SQCCs research fellows for 2018. I'm very happy about that. I'm honored by that. My fellow fellow, Bess Perry [assumed spelling], is very happy about that as well, and, so what I hope to do with you today is share some of the framework, some of the foundations that we have used in the US national park system, particularly in cultural heritage sites for the US national park system, that inform our perspective, and that we hope to take with us to Oman as we work on our research fellowship in and around Al-Saleel National Park. I could not have asked for a better introduction to this remarks. Well, that was a very lovely introduction. Thank you, but her excellency this morning made a statement that was just perfect for putting my interests and the remarks that I'll share with you today into perspective. She said to us that, "We want to maintain these treasures while sharing them with the world." And, that's the basic tension that I see at the center of tourism to cultural sites, and I hope that some of ideas that I share with you today can help us to all advance that cause. So, protected areas -- you're going to hear me use the word protected area. You're going to hear me use the word park. In this context, we're talking about the types of archaeological and cultural heritage sites that we've been discussing today. They're mission oriented. Once these places are designated by the government, they're dedicated to preservation, they're dedicated to helping people learn about culture, and they're dedicated to helping people enjoy and celebrate their cultures. But, these places are often also -- are also often marked by competing objectives, objectives for protection, objectives for economic development, objectives for different types of uses that create some tensions around the management of these places that need to be addressed. So, as I mentioned our research fellowship is going to be centered on Al-Saleel National Park. I have the location. Al-Saleel is a gazelle breeding facility. It is -- my understanding is that it is relatively newly designated, and right now management approaches are being developed and created for this place. Al-Saleel National Park lies along many of the most popular routes tourists take when they're in Oman. We can see it in these -- in each of these maps, Google maps, that people have posted about their tourism routes, Al-Saleel National Park is located on each of these. Right now it's a relatively small facility without a lot of developed infrastructure for visitors or tourists to use or to support their stays. And, so we hope to use our research fellowship to make some recommendations on how Al-Saleel can develop in a way that supports the tourism economy, that protects the culture, that protects the natural heritage of the place, and that engages in -- engages local communities in that process. There are a few basic foundations that we're going to bring to this. One is the concept of relevance. Another is the concept of objective based -- what is called objective based adaptive management, and I'll talk to you a little bit about that. Objective based adaptive management can help us know what needs to be done to protect these sites and to facilitate their use. And, then while we're working on this we want to do it in a way that cultivates a diversity of experiences and reflects the general democratic purposes of these places. So, those are the concept we'll go over, but let's talk about relevance first. When I talk about relevance in terms of protected areas, particularly cultural heritage spaces, I'm talking about having deep and broad and lasting connections between protected areas, park sites, or heritage sites and their managers, visitors to these places, and the communities that live in and around these places. These connections are the product of shared goals when done correctly, but building these connections can often highlight some of the tensions or competing objectives that we talked about earlier. Sometimes relevance is an easy thing to accomplish. Jazz National Historical Park is a historical site in New Orleans, Virginia, dedicated to celebrating the idea of jazz, a uniquely American art form. It's easy for Jazz National Historical site to be relevant. Who here listens to jazz? Every hand should be up. We feel it as part of our lives. It's still very much part of the community in which Jazz National Historical site is located. My -- where's my Arkansas friend? Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas is having a little bit more of a challenge with relevancy. Hot Springs National Park preserves some natural features, but it also preserves a set of spa or health, sort of, medical baths that were really part of the hay day of Hot Springs 100 years ago. And, we don't exactly practice health the way we used to practice health 100 years ago. And, so connecting relevantly between the park and the population in Hot Springs, Arkansas, is a challenge. Gates of the Arctic National Park up in Alaska has a -- faces relevance challenges, but for different reasons. It house resources like bears and caribou, salmon, and indigenous communities and their subsistence practices that we all value, however virtually nobody goes there, and it's impossible to get to. And, so how do you keep a place that is very physically distant from a population relevant? These are some of the challenges. We hope to explore relevance and provide some guidance to enhance the relevance of Al-Saleel National Park with a multi-phase, sort of, multiple methods research project, where we will be interviewing communities, stake holders around Al-Saleel National Park, as well as leaders in Muscat. We'll be asking these individuals to participate in structured interviews from which we'll be gleaning social network data about both connections that could make for strong partnerships, and obstacles that need to be overcome for partnerships to develop. And, we'll be doing that using spatially explicit methods with participatory GIS, mapping these connections on the ground. Bess, my fellow fellow, is -- she is the relevant one. She knows this much more than I do, but as far as I'm concerned the important part of this is that this is a process. It's about determining what our goals are, finding ways for our goals to align, and then moving forward based on those common objectives. Once we have those common objectives established we can move into an objectives-based management framework. So, I often work in wilderness settings, wildlands, mountain national parks where, like, solitude is one of the objectives. We want people to go out and have solitude in the wilderness, which is great, but how does a manager of a site manage for solitude? How do they measure solitude? Can they count -- well, there's one solitude over here and three solitudes over there, and, so we must be doing a better job over here. It's very difficult. So, once we have these goals or objectives defined in conceptual, broad, narrative terms we need to find quantifiable, measurable, manageable variables, proxy variables, that we can use to measure these objectives. And, then we have to set the threshold that help us evaluate whether we are accomplishing our management goals or not. And, I have a little story here about how we went about doing that at Castillo de San Marcos, which is a historical park at St. Augustine, Florida, the first masonry structure still existent -- the oldest masonry structure still existent in North America. Something like that. Not mason -- right, because there are the pyramids in meso-America, things like that. It has a first for some reason, and we're very proud of it for that. It is a star fort. It was built for the Spanish. It is a beautiful place to visit. It is designated to preserve the architectural characteristics, and to interpret the history of colonial Florida, both the Spanish and English histories as well as the history of the Native Americans who lived in Florida and interacted with the fort. 
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One of the key ways that the National Park Service and Castillo de San Marcos accomplished this mission is through education, through engagement of people. There are displays. There are reenactments, and visitors to this site learn quite a lot, except when it's crowded. When there are too many people coming to the site it's virtually impossible to engage with the education material. This site is visited by a lot of school groups, which is wonderful. Those school groups can learn a lot, but also those large groups moving through in an organized manner can inhibit citizen visitors, individual visitors, from learning and engaging. And, all of this is a big challenge for Castillo de San Marcos to accomplish its goal. So, if their objective is for people to be able to engage with the interpretive information and learn about and appreciate the history of Castillo de San Marcos and its role in the modern world, we need measurable, manageable variables to see whether we're accomplishing our objective. Well, one of the variables that we hit on was the number of people in any given area of the fort at one time. That variable is hard to collect, but what is easy to do is to count the number of people entering this fort. There's a door counter. It takes a click for every person who enters. We can correlate statistically after collecting some field data here, some of our great field assistants collecting some field data, we can correlate the number of entrees into Castillo de San Marcos, the relationship that those entries have to the number of people standing in front of the signs at any one time. And, we can say, "Okay, we want at least 50 percent of the people to be able to read the signs, so we need to keep our numbers less than 50 on the Y axis here. That means that we can have about 150 people at any one time entering this site if we want to accomplish our management goal of people being able to read the signs." So, we were able to take that information, plot it against the overall use of this site, figure out the days and times in which this site is sort of overused in terms of being able to engage with the interpretive material and provide some guidance to national park service about what to do to address this situation. So, that's our -- so we have -- relevance is based upon shared objectives and goals. We have our identified goal, in this case of being able to engage with the interpretive information. We're able to measure that -- our progress of that against that goal and determine whether we're achieving it or not without indicators and thresholds. But, then what do we do about it, right? We found out we're either successful, or if we're failing we should do something about this. We need to take some management action. Well, most often the management action that I see in places like this is, well, we need to decrease the demand being placed on these places, and we do that by limiting the amount of use. It is potentially affective, but in some ways it sabotages us in trying to accomplish our goal. If our goal is to get people to engage, if our goal is to share them with the world, limiting the number of people who can come into these places is not going to help us achieve that. So, I want to highlight that there are a number of other strategies and tactics or strategies and actions that can be taken to address these situations. We don't need to just decrease the demand. We can increase the supply at these places. At Castillo de San Marcos instead of decreasing the demand for reading signs, what if we increase the number of signs that there were? Or, increase the number of programs, or put up some lights and let people in at night and expanded the amount of time that people could visit? We can harden the resources to be more resistant to damages. We can adapt visitor behavior to be less impactful, and we can do this with any number of actions, and I have an example here from Mesa Verde National Park about how this happened there. So, Mesa Verde, a Puebloan settlement, now protected, one of the first national parks established, one of the first national parks national monuments established with the Antiquities Act, preserved cliff dwellings and other archaeological sites as well as petroglyphs. And, this place is facing some problems. It's facing problems with its historic and cultural resources associated with inappropriate use, graffiti, theft, and some of this use is starting to affect the integrity of the sites themselves. And, so Parks Service here has established a set of rules and regulations, and they enforce them with active law enforcement, and the way they do this is by requiring all visitors to enter the site with a National Park Service guide. So, we have a rule that says that visitors are welcome to the site, but only under the guidance of a trained ranger, and if you don't follow this rule you are punishable under the law. And, this law enforcement and rule and regulation has been coupled with a rationing allocation scheme, the size of the tour groups that can go in is calibrated not to exceed the maximum allowable, and by education programs that help educate people why these rules are necessary, which helps to gain compliance with them. And, this is all within a zoning regime, so that only the most sensitive sites within the park require this guided tour, while other, less sensitive areas of the park are open without that guide to provide a diversity of opportunities. And, so this diversity of opportunities is the fourth foundational framework that we'll be bringing with us to our work with Al-Saleel, the idea of opportunity spectra. That protected areas exist along a range, many ranges in fact, from urban to wild, from developed to primitive, from high use to ow use, from highly regulated to less highly regulated, from closer to cities to further away from cities, all kinds of different spectra. And, I think if we're doing a good job at managing our cultural heritage sites then we have a diversity of different types of sites. And, the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, also a world heritage site in Texas, I think does a good job of illustrating that. This is a chain of missions that runs down the San Antonio River south of the city, and there are many different missions along the way. There are primitive, small missions that have not been restored. There are larger missions that have been restored. There are recreational opportunities that link these missions. There are sacred services that are still conducted within these missions that are in line with their original establishment, and these missions as a whole park are managed not just for historical preservation, but also for wildlife preservation and ecological quality along the San Antonio River. So, I think the San Antonio River has done a good job of providing a diversity of opportunities along this corridor. And, one of the key things the we were interested in doing with Al-Saleel National Park is helping it fit within the diversity of tourism opportunities in Oman. Oman has a diversity of cultural heritage sites that we've heard about today. It has a diversity of natural heritage sites, it has a diversity of other opportunities that will draw tourists to the country and help the world realize what a wonderful place Oman is. And, so we look forward to bringing these foundations of relevance of the objectives and indicators based approach and the opportunities spectra concept to Oman in our research. And, I look forward -- one of the things I look forward here today, both with the rest of the panel and in the discussion afterwards, is hearing about your ideas about how we can apply these and other concepts to our work in Al Saleel when we're there. Thank you very much for your time.
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>> Joan Weeks: Thank you so much, Dr. Nathan Reigner. That was fascinating. I think we see a pathway forward, and this is really going to be a great opportunity for developing tourism in Oman. And, to continue on with this theme I really love this one. Traveling the sands of time, a foray into cultural heritage. Tourism in the Sultanate of Oman by Dr. Christopher Thornton. Christopher Thornton is the senior director of cultural heritage of the National Geographic Society where he oversees grants and programs in archeology, anthropology, paleoanthropology, and human geography. After lecturing at George Mason University, Dr. Thornton joined the National Geographic in 2010 to oversee the research grants program. In addition to his role in advising the National Geographic Society and National Geographic Media on issues related to cultural heritage, Dr. Thornton sits on the US Commission to UNESCO and is director of the UNESCO world heritage site of Bat in Oman. He's an expert in the origins of metallurgy  and early complex societies in Iran and Arabia. Dr. Thornton holds a PHD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. Please welcome him to the podium. 
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>> Dr. Christopher Thornton: Thank you. I should shorten that bio a little bit I think. Let me start by saying thank you to the Library of Congress and the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center for this wonderful opportunity. I was -- in the coffee break I was talking to some of my colleagues, and I'm pretty confident this is the very first time in history that all of the American archeology teams working in Oman have been in the same place talking about their projects. And, I'd like to throw it out there that this has actually been an amazing opportunity for us to hear what each other is doing, and America is actually growing force in cultural heritage in Oman. When Joy and Dr. Cable and I first started in Oman there were only three projects run by Americans, and it was heavily dominated by the French and the Italians, and the Germans, sorry, Olivie [assumed spelling]. And, nowadays, I would say that American teams are some of the strongest and the largest teams in Oman and are a major, major training grounds for students to learn archeology but also to learn about the Middle East, not just from America but students from all over the world come to work on American projects. So, I throw to you Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center to think about how we can maybe continue this dialogue and working together to kind of fuse this. So with that I will follow Dr. Reigner by saying that I'm not an expert in tourism. I'm an archeologist but unlike Dr. Reigner I have been to Oman, and I was very lucky to for two years be involved in a tourism effort in Oman, bringing mainly American tourists. So, instead of talking about the Bat project which I'm happy to do afterwards. Dr. Cable and Dr. Soritas [assumed spelling] my co-directors are also here, so we can tag team if people have questions about the Bat project. I thought I would just talk about this example that we ran a project for two years that had some success and some failures, but we learned a lot about what it takes to run a cultural heritage tourism program in the Sultanate of Oman, and I wanted to kind of share that with all of you today. So, any of you who've been to Muscat know that this is what a tourist looks like, right? So, they're mainly European tourists who come in off the cruise ships, and they come into Muttrah and they, you know, pour off the cruise ships and they ransack all the Indian and Chinese goods in the Muttrah Souq, and then they get back on the ships. And, all the Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis, and the Belujis [phonetic] are, like, you know, swirling around, and that's it, and that's tourism, right? And, it has almost zero benefits for the country. These people say, "I've been to Oman." Great, check, right? Occasionally, the slightly better tourists are the ones that come for this, and they come and stay at these luxurious resorts, traditionally in Muscat, you know, the Shetty and the Shangri-La and all these wonderful places I can't afford, and nowadays actually Salalah, if any of you've been, there's some wonderful resorts down at Salalah. So, all of this is for the good. It brings them there for longer, and occasionally they leave the beach, and they do little day trips, right? So, they hire a tourism company through the hotel to drive them out to Nizwa Fort, and they walk through Nizwa Fort with no guide, and they saw, "Wow, that was neat. Let's go back to the beach." Right? That's tourism in Oman right now, the vast majority of tourism, and I think everybody here knows that doesn't work, right? So, this is the challenges facing you, Dr. Reigner, welcome. And, so it was a funny coincidence that just a few years ago I collided with two now-friends, one of them Dr. Jeffrey Rose. He's known to many of you. He's an archeologist, American who, he and his wife have now been based in Oman for many, many years, and he runs a project in Dhofar. He became a National Geographic Explorer the year after a Palestinian became an explorer who's a specialist in conflict resolution and tourism, that is how do you use tourism to bring interfaith and intercultural dialogue? So, the three of us were probably staying up far too late, and we were talking about what potential there was in Oman for the kinds of projects that Aziz Abu Sarah had been running for many years in the holy land very successfully. So, I pointed out that the funny thing about Oman is it has a chain of UNESCO world heritage sites and potential sites like Salut and other, Qalhat, all in the Northern part of Oman, and there's that beautiful Sultan Qaboos Highway that runs all the way across to the Emirates. So, it's actually very easy to access these sites if you know what you're looking for, and it would be a very easy overland expedition. And, we started looking into it and realized that there's not a single tour company in the world that run, at that time, ran an overland expedition for tourists through the center of Northern Oman and into the Emirates. There were tour groups that go to Oman, and then they go to Dubai or they go to Oman, they go to Salalah. Sometimes they go to Nizwa, sometime, you know, they hop around but none of them just go through the country to actually see the real Oman, right, and those of you from Muscat know what I mean by the real Oman, right? So, we thought this was a really great opportunity. So, we approached our colleagues in the travel office, National Geographic Expeditions, of course believes in the power of science, exploration, and storytelling to change the world. I'm not staff in the expeditions side of the house as you heard. I'm on the nonprofit side, but the three of us went to them, and we bullied them, and we said, "Look, we need your help. We'd like to try this out. We'd like to experiment." They had said, "You know, we looked at it in years past, and there wasn't even a company on the ground that we could partner with to make this happen." So, Aziz said, "Well, my company, which is based in Jerusalem, will find partners on the ground in Oman and will make it happen." And they said, "If you can do it, then we'll make it happen." Well, luckily Aziz is amazing, and he couldn't be here today. He actually lives in DC, but Mejdi Tours, I just want to give a shout out, is a really amazing company that -- they've won a number of international awards. They work in places as diverse as Columbia where they bring tourists to meet with the FARC as well as government representatives. They've been running in Israel and Palestine for over a decade. At every site in Israel Palestine that you visit you will have a Jewish Israeli guide, and you will have an Arab Israeli guide and sometimes a Christian as well, a Christian Arab, and you'll get multiple perspectives on every site that you visit. And, the point of it interfaith and intercultural dialogue, and people come away completely changed in the way that they think about the world, right? So, Aziz said I can do this in Oman with your help, and luckily, Jeff Rose's wife, Maggie, is absolutely brilliant and a tour organizer. So, we had someone on the ground who could help. [Inaudible] Yeah, I know Maggie. She's a little bit like this. She would organize this whole room into color coordination if you let her. So, we were very, very lucky to have this incredible team on the ground, and we made it work. So, the purpose of the trip and remember National Geographic trips are intentionally designed to be educational, so we really, really -- and we don't give a test at the end but we might, but they're very educationally driven. And, it's -- we really believe in the power of tourism to change the world, right, that tourism can make a difference in how people approach their fellow humans and other places. So, the three of us had sort of three different reason. I'm number one, right? So, I'm an archeologist, and I wanted people to understand the rise and fall of urban civilizations through time, and I think Oman and the Emirates combined is a really, really wonderful place to see this, because it is a traditionally marginal environment that is the environment is not generally conducive for large urban civilization. And, yet multiple times throughout history, starting in the Bronze Age to today you've seen the rise of major cities. So, how does that happen and also I should note the collapse of major cities? So, we wanted to kind of look at that. Aziz was very keen, obviously, to bring Americans to understand what is an Arab. How diverse are the Arab people? What is Islam? How diverse is Islam? And to learn more about the Middle East other than what they see on Fox News or god forbid, you know, whatever else. And, then third, and this is definitely for those who know Jeff Rose. It was to experience the natural beauty of Oman to really know what it means, to be in the desert, to be in the mountains, to be on the coast, and to really experience everything that Oman has to offer which is of course a lot. So, I'm just going to zoom through this. I can always send this to people who are interested to know what the itinerary was, but just quickly I shall start there. We would start in the East, and people could either do a hike-up the Wadi Shab. People forget there is standing beautiful water in Oman. You can do a hike-up the Wadi Shab or if -- for the older, particularly people who are disabled or older, they would go to the Bimah Sinkhole, and then we would go look at Qalhat. We did not walk on Qalhat, because that is not allowed, but we would look at Qalhat, and we'd talk about what Qalhat was and why it was important. Sorry. Then we would do Muscat of course. We'd show them the modern city. We would talk about how Sultan Qaboos, in his great vision, saw a way to modernize the capitol without creating a monstrosity, allowing the culture of Oman to come forth in the capitol in a really beautiful way. I will give a shout out to the visitor center at the Grand Mosque. If any of you have been -- go there and have not been to meet the women who volunteer and work in that visitor center, it is absolutely a must. They are incredible. They're Omanis who volunteer their time to talk to tourists about whatever awkward questions they might ask, and they're really wonderful. And, we had multiple, multiple American, particularly women, ask very difficult questions, you know, "Does your husband let you drive?" and, you know, these women would laugh and laugh I mean, you know, but a lot of the American women who came on our trips would literally be in tears by the end of it, because just their whole worldview of an Islamic or an Arab woman was completely altered, and that was very powerful. So, huge shout out, because I think they do a really wonderful job. We'd then go into the mountains, go into real Oman, and we would go to Misfah, into other of these mud work villages up in the mountains to experience the Falaj system. We would talk about the al Falaj and how it was created and what means and how it creates these beautiful, beautiful paradises up in the mountains, talk about traditional farming practices. And, what was really wonderful is some of these villages which are still reserved, they have tiny, tiny little eco lodges run by families and very few people, usually just Germans and Poles, know about them, but they would welcome us, and they would give us a walking tour through their village and then host us for dinner. And, it was such a magical connection that most tourists don't have in Oman that is meeting real Omanis in their homes and talking to them about life in these beautiful mediaeval villages. You have to go Nizwa, of course, the sort of cultural and particularly the religious heart of the country, and we would talk about that. We'd talk about the two capitols, right, Muscat being the political and economic capitol and Nizwa being the cultural and religious capitol, do the for, as you must. But, I always love taking people to Bahla, right, one of the world's largest mud work structures, recently restored thanks to the Italians and UNESCO and others, [inaudible]. Bahla is interesting for those who have been there, because the restauration is absolutely beautiful, and there is not a single sign. You have absolutely no idea what you're looking at. There's not even guides. So, it's not like you could ask someone. So, I did as much research as I could do and my fellow guides to give them as much information as we could, but for a UNESCO world heritage site that is so gorgeous we need signage. I mean, just one sign would help. We would go from there to the Al-Ayn Tombs which luckily don't need much of a sign, because they're just gorgeous but we would explain what we were looking at. Obviously, these 5000 year old tombs never have been restored and in perfect condition which is really wonderful, and amazingly, tourists really connect with those. Tourists really, for some reason, it brings the archeology alive in a way that I always find amusing. I'm not sure why. I guess we're just -- we work there. So, for us it's like, "Yeah, the tombs. Yeah, yeah, yeah." And they just go, "Wow. These are incredible." So go down to Al-Ayn. We then take them to Bat, right? So, I've been working at that with Dr. Cable and Soritas and others who are here for almost a decade or over a decade now, and we've done a lot of research. We've done a lot of community outreach, a lot of education programs, and we have a lot of Wasta [assumed spelling], as they say, in Bat, and we're very proud of that. The people of Bat have always welcomed us, but we struggle to find ways to bring the site to life for tourists. Actually Charlie Cable is working with a group, with the World Monument Fund kind of think of a strategic plan for the site which is really important but without someone like one of us there, there is absolutely no point in bringing tourists to Bat, and again, it's a world heritage site, right? With one of us there or with one of the local Omanis who we have trained, who have worked with us for years and years, and they're brilliant and wonderful. With one of them there it brings the site to life, right? So, it's finding a way to connect tourists with these people who are trained, who know what they're looking at and can help explain it, it makes a huge difference. We then would cross the border which is always a very interesting experience for tourists. They're always shocked by how different it is, and that difference is really important, because it shows the diversity of the Arab nations, that they're not all the same, "the Gulf Arabs", you know, they're all just one thing. It's really important we felt to cross that border and experience a different part of the Arabian Peninsula. Obviously, we'd go Hili, the Al Ain Museum which is a wonderful collection. Now, we have the National Museum in Muscat, so we don't need the Al Ain Museum as much, and then we'd go for a little bit of luxury, right? So, the Al Maha Desert Resort is a wonderful example. Dr. Reigner, I would encourage you to at least research it, if you don't want to pay the 1000 dollars a night. But, it is a wonderful eco lodge. It is a protected area that they -- it's a breeding area for gazelles and the oryx, and they have created what is a fairly sustainable lodge. National Geographic will generally only work with sustainable eco lodges. They have a number of international certifications and sustainability. They use solar energy, they recycle water etcetera, etcetera, but it's that wonderful combination of tourism and preserving a natural landscape, including breeding programs. So, that was a really nice example that I never saw the equivalent in Oman but the potential is huge. We then would go to Abu Dhabi. We would go to the Grand Mosque. We would go on a dhow to talk about the coral reefs of the Gulf and how they've been affected by development and modernization. Many people don't know there are coral reefs in this region. The coral reefs in the South are actually way better preserved and way more interesting, Southern -- in Dhofar for example. But, people rarely know about them, so we try to talk about that ecology, and finally we'd end up in Dubai, and a lot of people say, "God, why would you end in Dubai?" Well, first of all believe it or not tourists know Dubai, and so you can sell the trip on the idea that you're going to give them an educational tour of Dubai. You're not going to casinos. You're not doing any of that. You're talking about Emirati culture and the growth of Dubai. National Geographic did a whole documentary about the Burj Khalifa and the construction and what it meant for the future of Dubai about five years ago, and we talk about that. We actually end the trip at the very top, the VIP lounge at the Burj Khalifa, looking out over Dubai which, of course, is, you know, one of the world's great 21st century cities in terms of modernization and all of the stuff, and I say to them, I always say to them, "Look at what you see. 5000 years ago this is what Bat kind of looked like." It had towers. It had these, you know, monuments. It was kind of the same and look at the way Bat is now. So, in 5000 years Dubai is going to be nothing, and that's what archeology tells you, right? It's about rise and fall of civilizations. You can never take things for granted. So, we talk about sustainability. How do you make these cities sustainable, so they last a little bit longer than they would otherwise, right? Powerful messages that this part of the world explicitly can tell that very few other places in the world can. Tourists loved it generally speaking. People had a great time but these were definitely adventurous tourists. They were tourists who have been to every other place on the map, and this was an area they had never seen before. So, they were willing to go a little bit off-road and try something new, which was great. We also, and just to throw out there being National Geographic, we do run photography tours, and basically we take our general educational tours and we just make it basically a week-long seminar or workshop about best practices in photography and instead of an archeologist leading the trip, we have one of our photographers lead the trip but we use the same itinerary, and that was actually very, very successful, because people who are into photography, they have a very good eye for beauty. They're interested in culture and nature and all of these things, and there's a huge market for it. And, Oman is, of course, visually stunning, right, unlike the Emirates which is a little flat but they really, really, got into Oman. They really loved the natural beauty, the culture of it. They just found so many opportunities. So, that ended up being almost more successful in terms of sales than our educational trips. So, positive reactions from the tourists, to the person they all said being introduced to friendly, tolerant Arab people in the stable and prosperous part of the Middle East completely changed their view of what it is to be Arab and what the Middle East is all about. They felt educated about world history and environmentally marginal areas, so that's good, I win. And, they -- to just point they really enjoyed both the natural and the cultural beauty. They were surprised about the wealth of diversity of these assets for tourism which was great. Now, some negative reactions, lack of information. I think we all know this. This is a key, key problem. If tourists go to sites and they don't know what they're looking at, they're not going to say good things about it, right? They're going to feel that they've wasted their time. They will put that online and then nobody will go, right? So, this is a very, very easy way to fix it. We've been trying in Bat for many years to do this, and we're going to keep pushing for it. Signs are the easiest and cheapest way to do this. We found that there was very limited interaction normally between tourists and their guides, even when the guides were Omani and Emirati. They didn't -- early on when we started the trip, the guides didn't know how to interact with the tourists, so they didn't. They were friendly. They were polite. They would say, "Now, we're going to go to the Grand Mosque. Here's the Grand Mosque." But they didn't know to talk about what's it like to be Omani, right? What is it like at home? How did you go to school? How did you learn to drive? What's your favorite, you know, football team? These sort of things that, again, humanize people. They make you say, "Omanis are just like me." Right, and that's so important, and they know that in Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, this is your whole mission, is that intercultural dialogue, and I really felt that this is something that we can work on with tourism in Oman is teaching the guides how to open up, particularly to Americans who, as you know, are a little overly friendly sometimes but to learn to open up in ways that are still comfortable to the Omani guides but allow the Americans to feel like they're learning something what it is to be Omani, and of course tourism infrastructure is a huge problem particularly when you go into the interior. There are very few hotels designed particularly for high-end tourism, and that becomes a huge problem, because you end up having to -- we would stay at the Golden Tulip outside of Nizwa which is about the nicest you'll get in the interior, and then we would spend one day to see all of the sites that I just listed before we got to the Hilih Rotana and we go through the border. It was a long day, because there is not a single hotel anywhere in that stretch. I think in Ibri now they have some apartment hotels or something but they're not a sort of -- it's not a common practice yet. And, I think that's an easy way to bring tourists to the interior again which is very helpful for the local people. Lessons learned, Omani guides are actually quite rare. They're growing, there are schools now, university courses to teach Omanis to be guides. They generally know how to deal with these tourists coming off the boat. They don't know how to deal with a high-end tourist who wants a real authentic Omani experience, and that's something we worked very, very hard with our Omani guides to teach them how to do that, and they were open, and these, you know, these guides are so smart, men and women, Omanis are so smart and are very well trained, and once we just showed them how, they took to it like that and were really brilliant. I should also note some of our Omani guides were wonderful photographers which was a talent that they had hidden, but once we started doing the photography tours, they brought out their own cameras, and suddenly it became a dialogue between the Omani photographers, the National Geographic photographer, and the tourist photographers, which was a really wonderful way to talk about how you see things and what you photograph and that kind of thing. Guides are often unfamiliar with their own sights. This is obviously around places like Bahla. You won't find a tour guide in Oman who can actually give you a tour of Bahla. That's a critical, critical problem. There are very few local travel companies actually run by Omanis. There's a number of travel companies that are run by Indians which is sort of typical in the Gulf to have the management be Indian, but the guides should absolutely be Omani. That is really, really important, and then this is obvious I think but just to throw it out there. High-end tourism is sustainable tourism, right? The ethos of Oman as set by Sultan Qaboos himself was we will modernize this country, we will advance this country, but not at the expense of our heritage, and that is of course the brilliance of him as a leader. If you want to do that, mass tourism is not the answer. There's no infrastructure for it, and it's highly destructive to heritage, and as we noticed from the cruise ships nobody benefits really. I mean, maybe China, dumping its products into the soup, but nobody is really benefiting. So, just to throw out there, I really think the future of Omani tourism is this high-end tourism where you have smaller groups but going more in-depth, into places like the interior and hopefully eventually to Dhofar which is Jeff Rose's vision that we would actually get there. So, with that thank you all so much and happy to answer questions later.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Joan Weeks: Thank you so much, Christopher. That was very fascinating. I'm ready to go. So, our next presentation is about constructing cultural heritage, the Jewel of Muscat Project by Dr. Eric Staples. Eric Staples is currently an assistant professor at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. He's an interdisciplinarian, a maritime historian whose interests include Indian ocean shipbuilding, seafaring, and navigation. In addition to his historical pursuits he has also been actively involved in a variety of maritime archeology and experimental archeological projects. From 2010 until 2016, he was the director of the Oman Maritime overseeing different maritime heritage projects for the Sultanate of Oman. Dr. Staples holds a PHD in Islamic history from the University of California in Santa Barbara, and I was just standing over at our display and I said, "Look at these maritime excavations we have here on table two." And he says, "I did that book." I think that's one of the things that's so phenomenal about our scholars today that -- and for me too, to have an archeological site that is not above ground but underground. So, Dr. Staples.
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>> Dr. Eric Staples: Good afternoon. I would like to echo my colleagues saying thank you first of all, Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, Library of Congress, your excellency, I think, is no longer here, for organizing this event first of all. It's been wonderful, spectacular room. I don't think I've ever presented in a room with this much gravitas I think. But, I would also thank you very much for inviting me. I have a confession. I was actually invited to present in the second panel of the day and talk about maritime trade and technology in Middle Islamic Dhofar but then they contacted me and said, "Would you be willing to talk about it in the third panel." About Jewel of Muscat, and I said, "Sure, no problem." But I have echo what every other person in this panel has said. I know nothing about cultural tourism or at least I thought I did until I saw Chris's photo of me on that cultural tour and I said, "Wait, that's me." I had actually engaged in lectures on their tour, in our experimental [inaudible]. So, well actually I know a little bit, a small amount. As was mentioned, I think also lesson learned, was write very short introductions. I am primarily trained as an historian with what you would call sustained interest in maritime archeology and experimental archeology which I'll talk a bit about what that actually is. And, I've had the incredible good fortune to have worked for eight years with a, what I'd call, rather unique team in Oman which was basically -- this is where I push the button I think -- yes, basically a team of archeologists, originally led by Tom Vosmer, the man with the grey beard and the Indiana Jones hat you can see over there who was sort of the founding father of study of maritime technologies in Oman and the Western Indian Ocean as well as Italian archeologists, Omani, and Indian shipwrights, boat workers, sail makers, model makers. Engaged in a wide variety of projects, everything from designed, developing, and constructing museum exhibits, oral history projects, boat documentation projects, maritime cultural landscape projects, documentaries, etcetera, the full gamut. But, I would like today to talk about the project that first all sort of gathered us together, and this is the Jewel of Muscat project. But, before I get into what the Jewel of Muscat project, and many of you might be aware of it, I would like to mention that Oman is rather unique in the Western Indian Ocean in particular, but even in the larger, almost global context, in that it has engaged in three significant, experimental reconstruction voyaging projects. What I actually mean by that is basically three projects where experts get together. They try to figure out the puzzle together, how ships that sort of enabled all of this maritime trade and interconnection that everyone has talked about so much today. And, then basically build them, and then try to sail them on the historic routes basically. The first, as you might recognize from this rather grainy photo, is the Sohar in 1980, '81, which was actually a very pioneering project. Undertaken by the Omani government, and under the direction of the Irish inventor and writer, Tim Severin, who basically at the time wanted to build a -- an hypothesis of what a early Islamic trading vessel that would sail to China, and that is sort of, often sort of, referred to in the mythical tales of Sinbad. And, then to actually replicate that voyage. And, they built a very large, sewn plank vessel in 1980 in Sohar, Oman, an entirely Indian team of carpenters, shipwrights, and rope workers. And, then sailed it in seven and a half months in 1981 from Muscat to China with an international crew under the command of Tim Severin. A remarkable journey. The book about it, Sinbad Voyage, I highly recommend you read it if you have a chance. Interesting, I referred to it as an experimental reconstruction rather than an experimental, archaeological reconstruction, because the evidence that they were basing it on was not archaeological. They had no archaeological evidence to really, reliably base itself on. So it was basically on very limited set of iconography basically, sort of, some drawings from the 13th century as well as drawings on some maps and a handful of textual references. The second one, Magan Boat Three, which is part of a larger series, I see some people smiling, is basically what I would refer to as an archaeological floating hypothesis. Putting together some rather diverse sets of archaeological evidence and textual evidence to try and come up with a working model of what a bronze age vessel that enabled all of this early globalization, as often refer to, but sort of, what we would call, long distance trade. This is a composite vessel made of reeds, reed mats, rope, a bit of wood, a large amount of bitumen as well as some leather, goat hair, even for the sail. This one, and it was actually four have been built, this was a third, and this was the only one to actually try to replicate a voyage. It, sort of, unfortunately sank on its way to India, but nonetheless, what you would call a very interesting project that the Omani government invested heavily in. The third is the Jewel of Muscat, which I will be actually talking about today, but before I talk about it I find it very interesting in talking about cultural heritage or archaeological heritage. This is, I would say, rather interesting about Oman in the sense that it is specifically crafting what you would call a heritage narrative, a maritime heritage narrative, around experimental reconstructions, which are rather different than your typical heritage narrative, which more focused on what you would call geographical archaeological sites or historical artifacts. These are modern interpretations that provide modern stories of a hypothetical past, which I also find sort of interesting, and sort of that modern construction of a past -- fabled past so to speak. Now the Jewel of Muscat was a bi-government initiative between the Sultanate of Oman and the government of Singapore, basically to do something relatively similar to the Sohar, and build an early Islamic sewn plank trade vessel. And, then sail it across the Indian Ocean. Unlike the Sohar, however, this was based on archaeological evidence. This was primarily on the Belitung wreck, which often referred to as the Belitung wreck largely, because it was found in 1998 off Belitung Island in Indonesia. Many of you are probably very well aware of this wreck. It is one of the most significant historical wrecks for Indian Ocean trade. It's dated to the Ninth Century CE, and it has over 60,000 artifacts. You can see here you have some green glazed ware, rather dramatic. You have some of the earliest examples of blue and white. The vast majority, however, are this Cheung Sha ware. An incredible amount of ceramics, but you also have other often referred to as priceless treasures. This cup's actually worth, I think, 14 million dollars, so it's not priceless, but rather expensive, and a variety of bronze mirrors as well. Sort of, this cargo all basically made in China was, most archaeologists assume, was on its way to west Asia to the Islamic world to be sold when it sank. Now, this is very fascinating for ceramics archaeologists that are interested in material culture, but for maritime archaeologists and historians of maritime technology, the real treasure was actually the wreck itself. This is the only historic wreck that has been documented and published. There's another one, more recent, that's currently being studied, but hasn't been published in any depth yet in Thailand. But, this is basically, sort of, our sole example of early to Middle Islamic maritime trading ship that we have. And, had the director, or I guess the person in charge of the second season of the salvaging team, Michael Flecker, who estimated there was roughly 40 percent of the whole left, which gave us an incredible amount of information. It has the stem, ceiling planks that you put the cargo on. It has frames, sort of the internal ribs, planking, and beams. But, what was even more interesting, and what struck the archaeologists that was engaged in the salvaging, it also has sort of a wide variety of technical detail that was completely lacking before. You can see here, this is the keel. You can see the size of holes, where the holes are located, the mortise in which the stem is placed. This provides a much more of a viable model for reconstruction, but even more interesting, what was the -- Michael Flecker, the archaeologist who specializes in Southeast Asian shipping and Chinese shipping, and he said, "This is clearly not Southeast Asia. This is clearly not a Chinese vessel. This is something very different." Particularly, because you could see here it was entirely stitched with natural fibers, all of the planks. There were no nails. There was no lashed lugs like you found in Southeast Asia, and the entire vessel was held together with natural fibers. This is around 1100 year old natural fibers with the actual ropes that you can see stitched in this, what we call, double vertical X pattern.
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So, the challenge of this project was then how do you actually reconstruct something like this as a modern, sort of what you would call, replica of this. Particularly, because this is by government initiative. The Sultanate of Oman basically said, "We are going to build this, and give this to the people of Singapore as a gift to showcase with the actual artifacts that Singapore actually bought from the salvaging company." And, so basically Tom Vosmer, the man with the Indiana Jones hat and the gray beard, sort of was the director of construction in Oman, the archaeologist that was involved in the salvaging Michael Flecker, and a maritime consultant working for the government of Singapore, Nick Birmingham [assumed spelling], got together, reviewed the evidence. There were a lot of gaps, though. It was only 40 percent. They tried to fill in the gaps as best they could with ethnographic evidence, with looking at iconography, to try and put together basically this, a three dimensional design, which was then built on a one to 15 scale model to try an actually look, this is the type of vessel that will be built. One of the issues involved with this is that, and it's a rather controversial collection, being just up the road from the Smithsonian. The Belitung wreck actually was not excavated due to best practices of archaeology. There was not a ministry that was over seeing it. It was not a university archaeology team. What it was was basically a salvaging company that had bought the rights to salvage it, and, so what that was basically is that there was -- Michael Flecker documented the wreck as best he could. But, there wasn't as much information as if it had been, what you would call, excavated over years and years. This is sort of a lost opportunity in many ways, but with the evidence that we did had, we still had an incredible amount, much more than we ever had actually. So, what was also very interesting, and I think what sort of eludes to, I guess what you would call, the material connection, these networks of Indian Ocean trade, was that the wood itself, that was identified, comes from Africa, India, perhaps even southeast Asia. We also have -- you can see here, I think it's your upper right, is basically Afzelia africana. That was a good portion of the hull, which is from Africa. We have teak, which historically comes from India and southeast Asia, and then we have also Calophyllum inophyllum puna. This was not in the archaeological record, but this is sort of what was historically used for making masts as bars. We used that, but also in conjunction with local woods, Acacia nilotica, a lot of -- and, just [inaudible] sort of basically as well. And, what we saw is that basically this wood, which is over 40 tons of wood that we used for the construction, sort of reflected not only sort of the different material cultures, but also represented the routes that we were actually trying to replicate in some ways. We then had a team of 40 archaeologists, shipwrights from India as well as carpenters from a technical college on Oman. And, model makers as well, rope workers, because it was entirely sewn, and started working. What was very interesting was actually that they sew boats in India, and we had expert rope workers that were actually stitching and training our Omanis on how to actually stitch a boat together. But, we rather foolishly thought that we knew a fair amount about this vessel based on the archaeological evidence. This piece is what I showed you, that technical detail, the keel. What I had never actually thought about is how you actually sew this together. They had to do it five different times to try and come up with a reliable pattern. I use this just as an example, because every single aspect or component of the construction was similar. We were sort of engaged in all of these questions that never really occurred to us until we actually were forced to try and reconstruct it to a certain degree. Had over 37,000 holes, because it was actually stitched. We did a rather extensive documentation process throughout, measured every single stitch. How long it took, who did it, etcetera, measured every single piece on the vessel. Did three D scans when we put it in the water and afterwards, measured individual frames. You can also see this is on the inside. It took about a year to build in general. Incredible process to watch, soft of, from beginning to end rather than sort of trying to look at the remains and to puzzle out what actually happened. This is her just before we put her in the water. There were a few issues with that, but she got in eventually, and this is during sea trials. We then spent five months afterwards making the mast, the spars, the sails, the rigging, doing sea trials, making sure that it was everything okay. And, then we sailed across the Indian Ocean on 2010 over a six month period on the basically -- a month to get from Muscat to Cochin. Spent a month in India doing maintenance and repairs, and then two weeks to Sri Lanka, and then over across the Bay of Bengal down through Malaysia, and arriving in Singapore. One of the interesting things about the journey as well was that in sort of studying the ship, we, what you would call, maritime archaeologists are excessively focused on construction largely, because that's all we were actually left with. But, there are some limited texts that actually talk about voyaging. There's also navigational texts. We were able to encounter, what you would call, the full spectrum of what might one actually encounter. We had -- the crew, I forget, yes. First of all, the crew, which was -- and, the captain of course, Captain Saleh al-Jabri, was the command -- Omani naval officer, 22 years' experience from the sail training ship, the Shabab Oman. We had around 18 to 20 crew at the time. It was ten Omanis that were a part of a 15 member permanent crew. This is the permanent crew here, as well as two Americans. Robert Jackson is also here, sitting over here, and myself as well as an Italian and two Indian rope worker, carpenters in case there were any issues. And, there were issues of course, as well as a rotating, what you would call, desk members. A variety of members from those countries that we were visiting. We had two Singaporeans, an Indian, two Sri Lankans, a Malaysian, as well as two camera men for the National Geographic documentary on the voyage. The father of the ship, Aba Supina [phonetic], Tom Vosmer, and Luka, the site manager for construction, and the goat and the chicken who did not make it to the other end, guest members definitely. Here we all are with our headgear. We would only wear this actually when arriving for video purposes. Otherwise we wore baseball hats and such. But, encountered everything from, what you would call, deadening calms. Like this, this sort of epitomizes to me the first month of sailing across the India Ocean. Just sitting for days often, very limited wind. Our average speed was around just over two miles an hour across the India Ocean. Gives you an idea of how slow you can actually mean. The flip side however is on the Bay of Bengal we encountered perhaps too much wind when we accidentally sailed through the southern edge of Cyclone Laila. Encountered -- here we are, 50-knot winds, seas in the excess of three to four meters, taking on seven tons of sea water a day. A fair amount of -- but, what was really interesting was how resilient and strong the ship was. A lot of the sort of historical records say how Marco Polo says they're terrible ships, and that he wouldn't ever ride in one, but they're actually much stronger and more resilient than we'd actually anticipated. We also cracked our mast, broke our mast in the squall, and fixed it, and had to limp in and find a new mast in Sri Lanka, which again I hadn't really considered. But, then now actually experiencing it, and going through all of the Arabic literature of the time period, I'm -- we're finding references to broken masts everywhere, and sort of reevaluating and sort of trade routes and the degrees to which the difficult we've had in finding masts. Often, sort of timber sources along these routes is very important. We also had to wonderful opportunity to experiment with Western Indian Ocean navigation, what we referred to it. It wasn't ninth century. The only texts we have on Indian Ocean navigation are from 15th and 16th centuries, [foreign language spoken], but we took both those texts with us, and we did a variety of celestial sort of star altitude measurements while we were actually traveling across. Navigation was GPS, full admission, but we were experimenting with it sort of a rather interesting and unusual conclusions. There was also, what you would call, a whole other educational, popular media, and diplomatic dimensions to the project. This was on one hand a gift from one nation to another, so diplomatic relations were being strengthened on visiting every country. Elaborate banquets, some of the best banquets I've ever been to were on this voyage. But, there was also a pronounced educational element, both within Oman, we had over 20,000 students come through our humble boat yard looking at sort of how to actually build a sewn vessel, learning more about their maritime heritage in general, but also engaging students and doing academic workshops as we were on the voyage. This is my colleague Alessandro Ghidoni, demonstrating how to use a Hashiba [phonetic] navigational instrument to a group of Sri Lankan school children as well, and we were doing this India and Malaysia and Singapore as well. So, the whole goal of it was sort of educational at the same time. Now, what does this have to do with cultural tourism? Yes, this was the puzzle I was trying to put this presentation together to make it sort of connect in some way, shape, or form. But, one of the very interesting things I have to admit on this voyage is that in participating in this entire project of about two years, I have to admit I was originally, before participating in this project, I was rather skeptical of the benefits of experimental archaeology to a certain degree. This project completely converted me. I felt in the two years that I engaged in this I learned more than my several years, I don't want to admit how many, in graduate school. And, what I found to be -- it was an incredibly educational experience. And, it also occurred to me the ways in which a ship, in particular an experimental, archaeological reconstruction, is the ideal platform for cultural tourism tours for high-end, sustainable tourism that say, for example, Dr. Thornton is talking about, that combine not just cultural tourism, but also engage them in research, educational research basically as well. So, this is my suggestion as a potential, what you would call, innovative and unusual and potentially fertile way of, what you would call, exploring the cultural tourism opportunities and emphasizing the maritime heritage of Oman. All right, thank you very much.
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[ Applause ]
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My apologies. They cut it off, thank you to every -- the project -- yes, thank you, my acknowledgments. This was a huge project that had an incredible amount of people. I would be here for another 20 minutes mentioning them all if I had, but very thankful to, first of all, the Omani government. His majesty the Sultan, for actually having the vision to initiate it, but also the project was run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under his secretary general's office, his excellency Sayyid Badr Al-Busaidi, as well as Dr. Sayyid's office, the office -- I always mess it up, but the adviser to his majesty, the Sultan, for cultural affairs. As well as the Ministry of Man Power for providing many of the Omani carpenters as well, and the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Singapore Tourism Board, as well as all of the wonderful photographers and technical [inaudible] that provided the images. The only image in that entire presentation is actually this one of mine, is the only photo that actually worth -- Robert takes -- an excellent photographer, a large amount of credit. But, thank you to all of them and the construction crew and the sailing crew as well. Thank you again, all right.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Joan Weeks: Thank you so much, Dr. Staples. That was absolutely fascinating. Ready for a ride on the replica. I think we have about two, three minutes for a couple of questions, and then we'll do a little wrap up. So, does someone have a question for our panelists? 
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[ Inaudible ]
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>> Audience Member: All right, if this was already covered when I was out for a minute, I apologize and withdraw the question. Did any of you place in context for the audience the various places that various people say that Ahmad ibn Majid was from, born and raised? Some say Tulfa [assumed spelling] in Ruselkama [assumed spelling], some say Suah [assumed spelling], and others say, well look at where -- it's Sinbad. That means probably something closer to Karachi. It would educate all of us, I think, if you were to generalize, specifically clear that up. 
>> Dr. Muhannad Salhi: I will answer this question. Ahmad ibn Majid was born actually in Galfar, and he is an Omani when it was United Arab Emirates, part of Oman.
>> Audience Member: That's right.
>> Dr. Muhannad Salhi: So, we don't have a doubt where he was, or what they call it, where he was born and the nationality. And, we connect Ahmad ibn Majid with Sinbad, yes. 
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[ Inaudible ]
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>> Dr. Eric Staples: Sure, [inaudible].
>> Audience Member: I felt like Joan. I felt like going sailing on your dhow, but I wanted to ask what about modern facilities? What about sailing such a long distance on a ship that was structured basically, what, 1000 years ago, how do you as a modern person are able to sail for such a long distance in a ship really not equipped the way a modern ship is? And, also I wanted to ask about safety, in other words, you know, Sinbad the sailor and the -- has all these adventures, and there's always the ship that is hit by a wave or by a whale, and he ends up on an island. And, you know, until another ship sails by, and then he takes it, but you were going to Singapore. There are these huge storms, and so on. Was there some form of security that you had? Where there some plane hovering above you? Was there another ship, you know, motorized boat to help you? So, I'm just trying to think about a modern sailor sailing on an old ship. What is that experience like?
>> Dr. Eric Staples: I think -- I think anyone that experiences this had to be truly honest with themselves. You're not actually experiencing what they experienced, and I think that's impossible. And, I don't think we were even engaging in, what's often called, experiential learning, sort of like these Civil War reenactments. We were trying to best understand what we could document about the sailing performance. We also, with the -- what you would call, with the Western Indian Ocean pre-modern navigation, we were trying to sort of put the pieces of the puzzle together in ways that haven't applied to say Polynesian navigation. They learned a fair amount from Polynesian navigation by actually applying it rather than just reading about it. But, the motto of the voyage was 21st century safety, ninth century everything else. Now, again that wasn't completely accurate. We had Snickers, and a few other modern amenities, but the safety was obviously a concern. It was a concern throughout, so we were doing -- and, I think it's a testament to Captain Saleh and his navy training. He was doing constant drills. We were doing constant fire drills, man over board drills. Robert, in addition to being one of the crew members, was also our medic as well and was trained for that. We had life rafts on board basically as sort of emergency life rafts for all the vessels. We were required to wear life -- inflatable life jackets and harnesses at night, and I think it's a testament we actually -- no one ever fell overboard during the actual voyage. Two people fell overboard during the sea trials in rather humorous events, but during the actual voyage no one actually fell overboard, and that was a testament to the training. We did have an escort vessel for the Malaysian portion largely, because we were sailing through the Straits of Malacca. We had no engine, and it's a very narrow passage with an incredible amount of modern shipping coming through that cannot basically turn. So, and we -- very challenging, we would go 50 miles forward and 50 miles back due to the currents and having a escort vessel there for that, but the rest of it we were without an escort vessel basically once we left Omani waters. So, but that being said I felt much safer on the vessel than you would probably think. In some ways I, full disclosure, I grew up on sail boats. I spent about ten years of my life living on sail boats. What was immediately apparent was not so much the safety issues. I trusted the vessel to an incredible degree, but was the -- how much more labor intensive the entire project was. You know, to raise a sail took eight people. It -- you know, and to raise both sails you needed, you know, 16 people. You needed full crew, and -- but, also, you know, experimenting with traditional latrines I think was the term, toiletries and traditional cooking methods, and all the rest of it was also very interesting and educational I would say. I hope that's answered your question, yes. 
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[ Inaudible ]
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>> Audience Member: So, the question is for Dr. Chris. You showed a slide where you gave us the sort of impression that most American tourists don't go beyond the superficial, Muttrah Souq and all that. The impression I get, and I could be wrong, is that German tourists tend to be a little more in depth when it comes to Oman. They tend to go to, you know, places beyond Muttrah Souq. Do you have an opinion or theory as to why is it that German tourists are more -- I mean, are they -- is Oman marketed better towards them compared to what is being done towards Americans, or are they just more adventurous?
>> Dr. Chris: Yeah, so this is a fully qualitative answer, because I have not looked into the data, but from my observations the vast majority of German tourists are the cruise ship, pour into the Muttrah Souq, buy a dishdasha, and get back on the boat. The ones that you're referring to is, when you go into the interior you'll be out in the middle of nowhere, and you'll run into a random group of hikers who are inevitably German or Polish, and they're living out in, you know, somewhere out in the mountains. And, they're a little more adventurous, and I think there is a marketing that through certain travel companies. So, for example, when we would go to these medieval villages and to these little eco lodges, the only places that they were really getting tourists from were Germany and Poland. And, again they were getting maybe five a month, right, very, very, very, very small, and this is not high-end tourism. It's more like adventure tourism. These are people who like to go hiking in the mountains. They want to disappear, so they plop their stuff at the eco lodge, and they take a tent and off they go, and then the eco lodge doesn't see them for three days. But, it's a very, I think, qualitatively, it's a very small minority of tourists, and I could not guess how that happened or why, but it seems to be the case. 
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>> Dr. Joy McCorriston: Hi, this is really for all of you, but as someone who works in Dhofar, I just want to -- I mean, my impression of tourism in Oman is that the vast majority of tourists in Oman are Emiratis coming down to enjoy, and Saudis perhaps, coming to enjoy the Dhofar monsoon. And, so in anything that is sort of interpretive and thinking about sustainability, I assume that that group also would need to be very much consulted and in the picture of, sort of, objectives in future development, at least for the southern part. 
>> Dr. Chris: Yeah, obviously I don't work in Dhofar. I think you're absolutely right, Joy. That is a major a tour group in Dhofar that needs to be considered. In the north, one thing that I know Dr. Cable has worked on a lot at Bat, is that fact that the vast majority of tourists that come to Bat are actually Omanis. And, that's a demographic that's not often talked about even by the Ministry of Tourism, because they're Omanis. They're not tourists. But, they are actually the largest group that would come to Bat. And, so Dr. Cable worked for two years with two local women in particular. So, we would often get women groups, right, Charlotte? It was the large groups of Omani women who would come together in a big van, and they'd go to see the site, and then they'd get back in the van and go where ever they went. And, Charlotte worked with two local women to get a bunch of signs and information made in Arabic, specifically targeting both the local schools, but also these Omani tourists. So, I think to your point Joy, it's not just about Americans and Germans and French coming. There's also a huge, huge market for Omanis and other, you know, Arab tourists to this region, particularly to Dhofar during the summer months, and that isn't often considered, and I think that's a really important point. Thank you.
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>> Dr. Joan Weeks: Well, I'd like to thank everyone for coming today, and I especially want to commend these panels. These fantastic presentations today, so if we can give another round of applause to all our presenters. 
^M02:56:23
[ Applause ]
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And, on behalf of all my colleagues in the African and Middle Eastern Division at the Library of Congress, and the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, particularly Kathleen Ridolfo and Harrison Gotherin [assumed spellings] who are the glue behind the scenes that made all this possible. Give them a round of applause, too.
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[ Applause ]
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We just look forward to having these presentations available, hopefully in a webcast format eventually, and thank you all so much for coming and enlightening us with these amazing tourism opportunities, cultural heritage opportunities, in Oman. Thank you.
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[ Applause ]
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>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at llc.gov. 
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