Ancient Pastoral Settlement in The Dhofar Mountains: Archaeological Excavations at Shakil and Halqoot

For much of Dhofar’s history and prehistory, most of its population has been mobile in search of wild game and with herded domesticated animals, which need new grass and browse. While few archaeological sites in the southern region of Oman suggest permanent or even semi-permanent occupations, there is now clear evidence of a distinct and perhaps unique episode of well-constructed, semi-permanent settlements in the Jebel Qāra, Dhofar. In 2012 and 2017, archaeological teams established a chronology, occupation history, and pastoralisthunter lifestyle of these settlements’ occupants, raising new questions about episodes of pastoralist settlement in long-term context. This paper documents the archaeological sites, their architectural details and layout, associated finds, and preliminary assessments of their faunal and vegetative components

PRELIMINARY REPORT ON A SURVEY IN THE HAZIMAH PLAINS: A HAMAD

Archaeology of the Near Eas

Socioeconomic development and changing reasons for using desert kites to kill gazelles

Possible reasons for using kites to kill gazelles are comprehensively reviewed in this article. Even though they are now well inventoried and documented, desert kites are still not well understood, as exemplified by the recurrent controversies about their function and dating. According to the dominant view, kites were hunting structures used to drive and to mass kill large herds of wild ungulates, particularly gazelles. Although kites were intensively used during the Early Bronze Age, some of them could have been built and used before that. Beyond these issues, the cultural and socioeconomic aspects of the kites phenomenon are even less understood, and therefore, we focus on changing reasons for the long-lasting use of kites as hunting devices. We contend that the reasons why they were used during the period of utilization for hunting gazelles changed, in most cases, in response to socioeconomic development. It is hypothesized, for example, that, as a result of urban development, kites may have been increasingly (but not exclusively) used to kill gazelles to trade their products with urban communities and farmers, even though they had other uses as well which are also considered. The main hypothesis presented in this article enables diverse opinions about the types of uses and reasons for utilizing desert kites to be reconciled, including in particular varied reasons given in the literature about why they were used for killing gazelles