Methodological Advances in Understanding Environmental Constraints on Sustainability and Industrial Periodicity of Ancient Copper Smelting in Southeast Arabia

Industrial periodicity is a hallmark of modern and ancient extractive economies. In Southeast Arabia, current evidence demonstrates that intensive periods of copper production are bracketed by century- to millennia-scale periods of little to no production. Explanations for this periodicity range from environmental degradation (e.g., deforestation related to unsustainable fuelwood provisioning) to shifts in local and distant trade networks to internal sociocultural factors. In this paper, we give an overview of the current understanding of this problem and introduce new data from the Archaeological Water Histories of Oman (ArWHO) project’s research along Wadi Raki, one of the largest and best preserved ancient industrial landscapes in Arabia. Methods used to generate this data include remote sensing, pedestrian surveys, targeted excavations, and laboratory analyses of production debris and wood charcoal to examine the periodicity of copper production. Our work provides a new baseline understanding of environmental and sociopolitical factors that drove changes in the tempo of industrial copper production in Southeast Arabia.