As part of the Center for the Humanities at Temple’s Borders, Boundaries and Walls Lecture Series, Dr. Nasser Al-Jahwari explores the role of the site of Dahwa as a regional redistribution center that existed at the nexus of two borderlands: on the coast with access to foreign traders and travelers and at the mouth of a major wadi that connected it to the rest of the Oman Peninsula. The Arabian Gulf has long been a venue for exchange of goods, ideas, and people. This is true today, as it was in the ancient past. The waters that separated the Gulf islands and the Arabian Peninsula from Elam, Baluchistan, and Indus have served as a trade corridor for more than 5,000 years. During the Bronze Age (3200-2000BC), trade focused on copper mined from the mountains of the Oman Peninsula in exchange for ceramics, personal ornaments, and other valued commodities.

Dr. Nasser Al-Jahwari is a landscape archaeologist and Associate Professor of Archaeology at Sultan Qaboos University in the Sultanate of Oman. He has extensive archaeological field experience and currently directs the field project at the 3rd millennium BC site at Dahwa area near to Saham, Oman. He is an expert on Umm an-Nar settlement patterns on the Oman Peninsula.