Umm Al Maa

A view of some of the mounds at Umm Al Maa.

In 1957, an ancient graveyard containing 50 cairns was found here by a Danish archaeological duo consisting of Geoffrey Bibby and Peter Glob. The average cairn had a 10-meter diameter and stood around 1 meter tall. One of the cairns uncovered by the Danes in 1957, which had a diameter of 6 meters, a height of 0.6 meters and a length of 1.9 meters, was of particular interest. Further investigation uncovered that it had a stone cist with three roof slabs (flat rocks used to cover a grave) encompassed by smaller rocks. The cist was facing north-to-south and was fitted into the bedrock. Within the cist lied a skeleton facing towards the north. As no grave products were found alongside the skeleton, the Danes were unable to date it. However, they were able to date pit fired earthenware and sherds of an alabaster bowl found in the cairns. They postulated that the cairns and pottery most likely dated to the Bronze Age (c. 3,000 BC), which they concluded by comparison of similar Bronze Aged cairns found in Bahrain.[6]

Picking up where the Danes left off was a Japanese archaeological mission which comprised Masatoshi A Konishi, Takeshi Gotoh and Yoshihiko Akashi. They surveyed Qatar from 1988 to 1991.[6] The Japanese team released their first report on the cairns in 1989. In their second report, they referred to these sites as 'burial mounds' rather than cairns. A burial mound dubbed J-2 by the Japanese team was found in an oval arrangement measuring 3.4 meters by 2.5 meters. Upon removing the roof slabs, a cist was uncovered. It was roughly 1.7 meters long and 0.3 meters wide. It comprised five or six substantial stone sections placed around the walls of a rectangular pit excavated into the bedrock. Inside the cist, a skeleton was found whose heading was roughly NWN-SES. As the skeleton was delicate, fallen slabs had fractured its head into several pieces. The skeleton belonged to a woman who was likely in late adulthood. No grave artifacts were found alongside the skeleton.[7]

Amid the second season, 1990–91, the Japanese group unearthed two burial complexes labelled J-3 and J-4, which featured a series of oval burial mounds measuring between 4 and 8 meters in diameter. The mounds were heaped on a thin, level layer of dark-colored sand with a depth of 4 to 8 centimeters. The mounds themselves were made mainly of light-colored sand and were slightly slanted.[7] After the mounds were dug up, oval arrangements of intently piled stones with recessed centers were uncovered. Disturbance of some of the mounds by grave robbers was readily apparent. Both complexes contained burial chambers covered by roof slabs and heaps of pebbles. Within one of the chambers, a skeleton was discovered, but it had decayed beyond the point of recognition, and no further information could be discerned. Artifacts recovered from the chamber include a little circular bead made of dark transparent flint glass and fragments of a bronze or copper bowl.[8]

More artifacts were discovered in the other chamber, including a cylindrical-shaped agate bead, two circular flint glass beads, pieces of bronze and copper rings, and an intact bronze and copper ring. Further items were found beneath the mound, including a stone mortar and fragments of pottery.[8]

There was little consistency in the planning of these burial chambers and the accommodations for their inhabitants. For instance, some were built to accommodate bodies in a contracted position, while others seemed to have been built to house more than one corpse.[9]

The Japanese team noted the similarity of the pottery and other finds to those of a Seleucid site on Failaka Island and posited a date of sometime between the first century BC and the first century AD.[10] Archaeologist Muhammad Abdul Nayeem has stated that these burials were reminiscent of graves purportedly built by nomads in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia around the third millennium BC.[9]