The Elders of Early Dilmun

This chapter draws on bioarchaeology and mortuary archaeology to investigate three adult men in a brief case study from Early Dilmun, a Bronze Age polity that spanned the western edge of the Arabian/Persian Gulf at the end of the third and the beginning of the second millennium BCE. We draw our evidence from the Peter B. Cornwall Collection at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology on the University of California, Berkeley campus. Cornwall (1913–1972) excavated this evidence from Bahrain during his expedition to the region in 1940 and 1941. Cornwall later analyzed these mortuary contexts in several works—including his doctoral dissertation and a handful of articles—and then eventually deposited the skeletal remains and objects in the Hearst Museum. Since 2008, we have been analyzing and publishing materials from this collection under the auspices of the Dilmun Bioarchaeology Project. Using this evidence, we demonstrate both the possibilities and limitations of investigating masculinity in one specific ancient Near Eastern society.