Masashi ABE

I have been involved in archaeological exploration in the Near East since 1997. My research interests are the origins of agriculture and pastoralism in the Near East and interrelationship between Mesopotamia and its periphery. Currently I have projects in Iran and Bahrain.

In the 4th millennium BCE, the oldest civilization was born in Mesopotamia. But Mesopotamia is lack of important resources because the region was a vast alluvial plain created by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. So early Mesopotamian polities needed to acquire the resources from its neighboring regions. In the late 4th Millennium BCE, they advanced into the neighboring regions and constructed a number of trading stations. We started excavations at Kaleh Koub in Iran in 2017. Although the site is over 1000 km away from Mesopotamia, the site yielded amounts of Mesopotamian pottery. This suggests that the site was one of the Mesopotamian trading stations.

In the 3rd Millennium BCE, the sea trade developed and most products were transported into Mesopotamia by sea. Dilmun is a kingdom that monopolized the sea trade in the early 2nd Millennium BCE and currently identified with the modern Bahrain. We have been excavating Dilmun burial mounds since 2015 to study the developments of social hierarchy in Dilmun.

In this project, I would like to study the dispersal of pastoral nomadism from Levant to the Arabia Peninsula. Stone tools, which are techno-morphologically similar to those of Levantine PPNB, were collected in Bahrain. This suggests that the pastoral nomadism which were born in Levant, quickly dispersed into the Arabian Peninsula and reached Bahrain. I plan to do research on the Neolithic in Bahrain.

Selected publications
・Gotoh, K., Saito, K., Abe, M. and A. Uesugi (in press) “Excavations at Wadi as Sail, Bahrain 2015-2019”. Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 50
・Abe, M. and M. Khanipour (2019) “The 8.2ka Event and Re-Microlithization during the Late Mlefaatian in the Zagros Mountains: Analysis of the Flaked Stone Artefacts Excavated from Hormangan in North-eastern Fars, South-west Iran.” In: Decades in Deserts: Essays on Near Eastern Archaeology in Honour of Sumio Fujii, edited by S. Nakamura, T. Adachi and M. Abe, pp. 305-317. Tokyo, Rokuichi Syobou.