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Miss Beatrice de Cardi, Secretary of the Council for British Archaeology, has for some years been engaged in research in the countries bordering the Gulf. A full report on the survey which she carried out with Mr D. B . Doe in Ras al-Khaimah will appear in 'East and West'; the present article relates only to sites and material of the Portuguese period: a charming 16thcentury Portuguese map is reproduced as Plate XLIII.

Ras a1 Khaimah is the most northerly of the seven states comprising the United Arab Emirates and its Ruler, H. H. Sheikh Saqr bin Mohammad al-Qasimi, is keenly interested in the history of the state and its people. Survey carried out there jointly with Dr D. B. Doe in 1968 had focused attention on the site of JuIfar which lies just north of the present town of Ras a1 Khaimah (de Cardi, 1971, 230-2). Julfar was in existence in Abbasid times and its importance as an entrep6t during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-the Portuguese Period-is reflected by the quantity and variety of imported wares to be found among the ruins of the city. Most of the sites discovered during the survey dated from that period but a group of cairns near Ghalilah and some long gabled graves in the Shimal area to the north-east of the date-groves behind Ras a1 Khaimah (map, FIG. I) clearly represented a more distant past.

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The winter of 1973-74 saw the extension of British archaeological activities to Qatar, an independent Arab state on the western shore of the Gulf to the east of Bahrain (FIG. 1). Surrounded on three sides by sea, Qatar’s inland borders lie with Saudi Arabia on the south-west and Abu Dhabi on the south-east. From the air Qatar appears to rise imperceptibly from the sea, its arid limestone plateaux stretching endlessly southward until they meet the high encroaching dunes from Saudi Arabia. Although generally flat the terrain is far from featureless and low cliffs, eroded mezas and dramatic gas flares add interest to the landscape in the west near Dukhan where the British Archaeological Expedition to Qatar was hospitably accommodated by the Qatar Petroleum Company.