Syria - Al-Rawda

Research Themes
Urbanisation and urban planning in the Ancient Bronze Age (3rd millennium) in Syria, subsistence strategies and land occupation modes in arid milieus.

Al-Rawda is an Ancient Bronze IV site set in the Syrian steppe, around one hundred kilometres east of the city of Hama, and in the North piedmont of the Palmyrénides mountain range, in an arid zone. Discovered in 1996, during a sprawling regional prospecting campaign (see. Archaeology Notebooks, Badiya; The arid fringes of the Fertile Crescent), the site has been under excavation since 2002 by a multi-disciplinary Franco-Syrian team.

Al-Rawda appears as one of the few new cities in the Syro-Mesopotamian territory known during the Bronze Age, barely a few centuries after the start of the urbanisation of Syria. It is organised along a pre-designed radio-concentric urban planning scheme; founded around 2400 BC, it was abandoned before 2000 BC.

The out-cropping, on the site’s surface, of the vestiges of the Ancient Bronze Age has made it possible to extensively - and often, exhaustively - excavate a large number of architectural vestiges: fortifications (transversal trench), the city gates, a religious complex and habitations. The site is associated with a necropolis, where some of the tombs have been excavated.

Studying the site at the micro-regional scale (100 km² around the site), one finds dense occupation across the territory in the Ancient Bronze Age IV and a wide range of ground occupation modes in the steppe zone during this time.

Because the city was founded in an arid zone, major works had to be carried out to maximise the local resources (various types of hydraulic structures). The economy was based on optimally drawing upon the environment and a variety of modes of production: pastoralism, diversified agriculture, dry and irrigated, exchanges and trade.