widespread in the Gulf until the oil era. Southern Mesopotamian fishermen working the rich fishing banks off the Arabian coast may have visited these sites from time to time to salt and dry their catch, bringing pottery with them and giving it to the local inhabitants or perhaps exchanging it for fresh meat.

The first Ubaid potsherds in Qatar were found by the Danish expedition at Al Da'asa in 1961 but not identified until later. Post-holes from shelters survived at the site, and a poignant find was a neat stack of domestic implements: querns, a grinder, a pounder, a slab of coral. Whoever piled them so carefully clearly intended to return, but never did so.

Ubaid pottery of a slightly later date than at Al Da'asa was found at Ras Abaruk by the British Expedition of 1973-4.

An area 200 metres square yielded not only potsherds but quantities of flint debris and tools amounting to an estimated 11,000 kilos. The amount, plus the bones of mammals, birds and fish, suggests that the site was of a hunting-gathering-fishing camp visited seasonally over many years.

French excavations on low hills at Al Khor in 1977-8 revealed more pottery from this period, as well as fragments of stone vessels. Between 1977 and 1981, eight cairn burials out of a group of eighteen were excavated, dating from the Ubaid period. Each consisted of an oval pit over which a low cairn of limestone slabs had been erected. Four skeletons in flexed position remained intact. The graves contained shells, and bone and stone beads, including seven of obsidian.

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