The Coming of Islam and the Islamic Period in the UAE

Although the Islamic archaeology of the UAE has only been investigated in a sustained manner in very recent decades, the amount of information that it provides has been so great that, for the pre-modern period, it is now at least as important a source for the country’s past as the rather sporadic and limited literary evidence. As a result of archaeological survey and excavation, form has been given to periods in the UAE’s history that were hitherto invisible. The archaeological record now shows the nature of the UAE’s settlement patterns and uses of the landscape, its social and economic structure, and an architectural tradition, little of which is apparent in the written sources. For the Islamic period, as for earlier times, archaeology is in fact often the only means to retrieve the past of the UAE and new fieldwork on sites related to the last 2000 years has brought the country into the historical framework of the Near East as a whole.