Umm Al Ma’a, which means in Arabic (Mother of Water) is vast barren area located in the northwestern parts of Qatar Peninsula, few kilometres from the two famous Islamic sites Murwa’b and Zubara.
In this vast area with beautiful landscape, one can easily observe many ancient burials scattered at the site. The varieties shapes and sizes of the burials suggest that they might belong to various periods and times before Islamic eras. Remains of a fort attributed to the seventeenth century is also found at the site.
The area also seems to comprise sites attributed to the prehistoric times. For this reason, Umm Al Ma’a area is considered one of the, if not the largest such site in Qatar Peninsula.
Over the last fifty years, Danish, French, British, Japanese, German and local archaeological teams investigated the area and carried out short seasons of excavations at Umm Al Ma’a. Unfortunately, these excavations produced meagre results. Those unfortunate results were mainly due to the plundering of numerous burials in ancient and modern times. The general finds at the site during the field survey, however, were pottery sherds, pieces of worked stones, and few stone beads.
In following is a short account for the results of the Japans excavations carried out 1988-1991.
In addition to that, are the results of excavations carried out by the writer at one burial in 2009.
Summery (quotation) for the results of the Japanese team:
“Through the excavation of all four tumuli belonging to the same type of construction, we have also tried to reconstruct the process of building tumulus.
First stage: A round or oval pit is dug in the bedrock through the thin surface layer of dark sand.
Second stage : A little corbelling wall is then built around the periphery of the pit with 3-4 layers of larger stone blocks. Open spaces among the blocks are further filled with small stones and fine sand or soil.
Third stage: Corpse is put in a flexed position possibly with some funerary objects on the bottom of the pit.
Fourth stage: The chamber is entirely covered with closely piled stones to forma cairn. Central structure is now completed.
Fifth stage: The central structure is then entirely covered with a rather low round mound of sand layers. Covering stones are put on the surface of the mound and the whole tumulus can be thus completed.”
If that was the case presume that the tumuli of Umm Al Ma’a right after building, could have been even higher than they are now, and that both weathering by the strong wind blowing from the sea for a long time and later plundering have changed the outlines and reduced the dimensions of the mounds considerably.
As for the one tumulus excavated by the writer in 2008, actually, it was raising nearly fifty centimeter above the ground level.
Parts of the burial covered with hard stones. After removing them and penetrating inside the burial chamber, pieces of small pottery sherds mixed with soft earth began to appear.
At the bottom of the pit, fragments of human bones were found as well. Some seemed mixed with crushed pottery and small fragments of hard stone.
After cleaning the entire area, the burial chamber turned to be rectangular in shape measuring approximately two meters in depth, two metres long and one and half meter wide.
The absence of dating material such as pottery ware or bronzes made it difficult to give any approximate date for the burial. However, the general shape of the burial chamber, and the way it cut into the hard ground were clear indications that it is very close to those burials dug by the writer at Al Qusais site in Dubai Emirate. In seventies of last century and dated to the Iron Age Period (The very end of the second millennium BC to first half of the first millennium BC).
The Peninsula
