The rise of socio-economic complexity in non-urban societies: Function, organisation and social meaning of space in Early Bronze Age Eastern Arabia.

This paper will focus on the arrangement and the function-related organisation of space as a proxy for the characterisation of social and productive units, and of socio-economic complexity, in pre-protohistoric non-urban societies, focusing in particular on Early Bronze Age Eastern Arabia.Thoroughly explored, the sites of Ra’s al-Hadd HD-6 (c. 3100-2600 BCE) and Ra’s al-Jinz RJ-2 (c. 2600/2500-2000 BCE), located in coastal Oman, will be used as case studies to present an approach that integrates the three dimensions conceptualised by Amos Rapoport – within the scope of environment-behaviour research – as fixed-feature elements (buildings, walls…), semi-fixed-feature elements (“furnishing” of all sorts – including artefacts) and non-fixed-feature elements (people and their activities and behaviours). This relation is investigated in a diachronic perspective by combining the analysis of structural design with the analysis of systems of activities, examined through the distribution of ecofacts / artefacts, and including the various classes of manufacturing indicators.Archaeology of the Near Eas