Located at a key crossroads of global dispersals, and with a proven but little-studied record of Palaeolithic occupation, southwestern Saudi Arabia possesses a surface record key to understanding the conditions of Pleistocene dispersals out of Africa. How different Homo species (H. erectus, H. sapiens), utilised their landscapes, and subsequent implications for their abilities to disperse from Africa and eventually people the globe is poorly understood. Added to this, interpretation of past hominin landscape use from present-day artefact distributions is not straightforward. Distributions are the sum of varying behaviours over time, while landscape evolution alters the distribution and availability of resources linked to these behaviours (e.g. water, raw materials), and the differential preservation and visibility of archaeological evidence. Only by developing a robust, well-dated model of landscape evolution, and detailed recording of surface artefacts in relation to the geomorphological units comprising the landscape, coupled with theoretical paradigms that engage with the variable time depth of surface assemblages, can the potential of this record for informing on past hominin landscape interactions be realised.
SURFACE brought together researchers from the UK and Australia at the cutting edge of developing approaches to the surface record. Utilising remote sensing, geomorphology, archaeology and spatial analysis it developied interdisciplinary methods to record and analyse the globally-important southwestern Saudi Arabian Palaeolithic record, and its implications for our understanding the way hominins used their landscapes to disperse across the globe, with methodological and theoretical implications beyond the time period and region in question. In recording the >3,000 newly-discovered Palaeolithic artefacts at Wadi Dabsa, as well as their relationship to an evolving landscape including volcanic eruptions and periods of water flow in the basin, it provided the geoarchaeological framework for this important assemblage (the richest recorded to date in the region) that will be chronologically constrained with the conclusion of dating work currently underway, and will allow this assemblage to be understood in its environmental and wider behavioural context. In addition, by applying the regional landform mapping to locating new Palaeolithic archaeology in the under-researched northern Red Sea region, it has located a new, rich record of Paleolithic archaeology in another region key to understanding hominin dispersals.
