My trip to the Shimal Archeological Site!
I am an intense admirer of history in all of its forms and one of the best ways to learn about the peoples of old is to dig up what they left behind. One of the most interesting things you can do when it comes to outdoor activities is to visit one of the places where skilled specialists investigate these remains, and so for this post I decided to visit the Shimal Archeological Site.
The Shimal Archeological Site is located about 8km northeast of Ras Al Khaimah city near the modern village of Shimal and it is the largest pre-Islamic site in the emirate of Ras Al Khaimah. It isn't the best preserved archeological site that I have ever seen, it's almost as though the archeologists came into this rural area, dug a bit, took what they thought was important, and left. So now the local cattle farms and inhabitants of that area have been left to do as they like around the dig sites. Although they have fenced off the site (which is pretty huge) and added an extra layer of fencing to the areas that have actual remains in them, it is still hard to take their conservation efforts too seriously when you see so many goats roaming through the rubble freely.
So now that I got the all important goats out of the way, let's carry on with our visit to the site. At first we had some difficulty finding the site because although it isn't that far from where we live it's really tucked in behind the local villas and fruit markets of the Shimal area. If that didn't make it hard enough, once we got down to the last stretch of our journey and broke away from the beaten path, we ended up in a lot of very muddy, very confusing, and very unpaved, roads/pathways. As I mentioned before the "site" is kinda big so when we finally hit this fence that just continued forever and saw some hut shaped piles of rubble, we decided that we must have struck gold, and so we proceeded to go through the closest entrance that we could find.
Now I need to step away from our riveting adventure for a second and explain a couple of things. To start off with as I have mentioned multiple times the "site" is sizable, and although the four main finds that are really worth looking at are all pretty close to each other the archeologists found a bunch of other piles of cobble stone that they believe are either the remains of huts or graves, and these are scattered all over which is why the area fenced off is so big.
Coming back to our visit, we entered from the side opposite to the four major finds so at first all we were really doing was driving on what can only just barely be called a road -- passing by a couple of houses, a few of those previously mentioned hut graves, and a bucket load of goats. Then at long last after getting out of the car a couple of times to look at interesting rock piles and dodging goats like Neo dodges bullets, we reached one of the group burial sites which I include under the four major finds. There are two of these circular grave sites known as Umm an-Nar tombs; the second one being just a little ways down from the first one we saw and being almost exactly the same I am mentioning them together. They housed quite a large number of people. The most bodies that archeologists found in one of these two graves was 300 separated into 8 neatly ordered segments. They were divided by limestone "Ashlars" that still have some preservative coating on them from when they were first placed, along with a large amount of pottery, beads, and other personal items.
After arriving at those large tombs it didn't take long to find the next "major" unearthment, which was another large tomb that had been constructed as a rectangle much like the other grave huts that are scattered around. For whatever reason this one was chosen to have an additional oval ring wrapped around it to provide space for more burials, and a somewhat large slab that was probably used for offerings. Then to top it all off there is a horseshoe shaped ring of rocks that has been wrapped around the whole thing for no apparent reason, however the archeologists say that it had been added later so it probably isn't related to the whole burial theme.
Last but not least the fourth "major" find is the living area of whoever was residing there. From a first look it appears to be just another large pile of rubble but when you get closer you realize that it is probably the most detailed area in the whole archeological site. You can just make out the stone foundations of an L-shaped wall (most probably meant to screen off the domestic area), a covered gutter in the corner to drain away run-off water, and a narrow entrance on its southern side with a big monolith (which is weird to me) and the remains of a stone circle just behind it. In this area they found many personal items like pottery, jewellery, spearheads, and other things like animal remains and some fire pits that can still be made out (at least when we went there). There was also what is believed to be another tomb in the back of the living area where archeologists found remains of several people mixed with some pieces of pottery. There is also a smaller house/hut just a little ways off of the main living area probably used for a family member who needed their personal space or (more likely) a servant/slave of the family.
So with that we left the archeological site and got some lunch. I hope you all enjoyed coming with me on this expedition, altogether I think that it was very interesting although I do like history in every form so I have a bit of bias; but putting that aside I would still suggest it to other history nerds or just someone who is visiting RAK and is tired of sitting in their hotel popping into the typical tourist attractions, and wants to go somewhere outdoors and kind of off the map, so to speak. So anyway thanks for reading, I hope to see all of you next time.