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Kuwait Times People in the Gulf region must learn to live with historical monuments and incorporate them into the tissue of modern culture as a reminder of the past, said the head of the Polish archeological mission Professor Piotr Bielinski. The mission, which was invited to Kuwait two years ago after the signing of a five-year excavation agreement with the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters (NCCAL), came to the country to conduct an archeological survey prior to the construction of Silk City in Su biya. Since then, the mission has excavated numerous graves, as well as a strongly-constructed desert well, and a settlement dating back to the fifth millennium and built in a style common to the Obeid era. Not all of the excavated structures are worth preserving, but these must be properly documented," he explained. Prof. Bielinski, the Director of Warsaw University's Polish Center for Mediterranean Archeology, continued, "Kuwaitis have the right to be proud of the excavated well, which is much better constructed than any other historic structure in Kuwait. The kind of construction is precise, well-balanced and suggests that the people who lived here had construction skills and a good sense of engineering. The well, the uppermost part of which was first discovered by NCCAL's Director of Antiquities Sultan Al-Dawish, comprises a circular stone wall measuring nine meters in diameter, inside which is a three-meter-deep well shaft structure with a staircase leading down into it. As archeologists, our means for dating is mainly pot shells, and in the well we found a single pot that is not easy to date, so we have yet to conclude the era in which the well is built. However, we believe it to be within the span of 2,000 BC and 1,500 AD," Al-Dawish explained. The location of the well suggests that it may belong to a series of wells, which may have been constructed to support caravan travel or guarantee tribes access to water, he said. Another excavation mission that the Polish team is working on is what has been labeled 'SBH 38' - an ancient settlement dating back to the fifth millennium. We know that this settlement dates back to the fifth millennium because our Kuwaiti colleagues found pot shells of the Obeid culture in southern Iraq, and this was the Mesopotamian culture that spanned from Oman to the Mediterranean," Bielinski explained. The settlement being excavated by the Polish team covers an area of about 200 square meters, which is much larger than the settlement excavated by a British team at the outskirts of Subiya. We have exposed something that looks like a typical, single-storey Obeid-type dwelling which in reality is a model of the Sumerian temples. The dwelling comprises more than 20 rooms and is regularly built," he noted. The reason why these people would choose to leave southern Iran and settle in Subiya is unclear, especially as they were people of agriculture. Among the theories the professor disclosed was that Kuwait was an important part of the chain in the trade route to Bahrain or Oman. We cannot count on finding a written account to answer our questions, because the Obeid culture was the last of the cultures that did not use script. Thus, we have to reconstruct history from what we have," Bielinski said. However, the professor said that the settlement reflected traces of Mesopotamian influence in the region, which changes the general picture of the Gulf. "When you construct houses in the structure of a culture it means you are accepting the ideas behind such a plan...the dwelling design reflects family structure, habits and everyday activities. As for the excavated graves, which were the original mission of the Polish team, the professor said that there were at least 2,000 scattered throughout Subiya and that although most had been robbed, some were still intact. We look for intact graves not for their treasures, but to help us determine the era from which they come, because the material sheds light on the former inhabitants of this part of Kuwait; their lifestyle, diet and mean life expectancy," Bielinski explained. In response to a question about how far back these graves dated, he said that it was difficult at present to say exactly because modern dating equipment only worked with uncontaminated samples. Rainwater, for instance, introduces new elements that influence lab analysis, thus giving an inaccurate result. "Generally, we can say that the graves in Subiya date from the wide range of 4,000 BC to maybe 1,000 BC - which is far from precise," he said. Asked what work the Polish excavation mission would be doing during the next season, in the spring, Bielinski said, "In cooperation with our Kuwaiti colleagues, we will launch a study of ancient wells in Subiya...we will continue excavating graves, and working on the SBH 38 settlement." When the team first arrived in Kuwait two years ago it consisted of only six members, but has since expanded to 15 as it became more evident what tasks were at hand and what specialties were needed.
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