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The UNESCO World Heritage Sites of Bat and al-Khutm are renowned for their Early Bronze Age monuments. Together, they form part of a broad archaeological complex dispersed across the Wadi al-Hijr floodplain, its tributaries, and surrounding hills. While archaeological remains are distributed throughout this landscape, the highest densities of materials—towers, tombs, settlement structures, and related features and artifacts—are found on the hill peaks and slopes lining the wadi valley, including the Bat Settlement Slope, al-Ahilya, and al-Khutm Settlement. These locations preserve dense palimpsest of domestic, monumental, and mortuary materials at or just below the ground surface. Rather than a continual occupation, the remains reflect an intermittent presence and repeated reoccupation from the late fourth through the first millennium BCE. Such complex sets of multi-period surface remains are common at archaeological sites throughout the Hajar region, yet are rarely addressed through an explicit methodological or theoretical framework. Drawing on recent fieldwork by the Bat Archaeological Project, this paper conceptualizes the Bat and al-Khutm landscape as a cultural palimpsest spanning the Bronze and Iron Ages. Methodologically, it examines the challenges posted by superimposed occupational layers of site documentation, spatial analysis, and material characterization. Theoretically, it considers how palimpsest—where each occupational phase overlays and interacts with preceding remains—shapes the formation, use, and perception of the site as a cultural space over time. Results speak to larger interpretive issues of continuity and change in this characteristically Arabian landscape.
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While the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bat, Oman, is famous as an exceptionally large and well-preserved Early Bronze Age oasis settlement, the site's archacological landscape extends far beyond the oasis. The Bat Archacological Project (BAP) aims to better understand the complex array of Umm an-Nar period (ca. 2700-2000 BCE) cultural activity and human-environment interactions evidenced at the site and its environs in the Wadi al-Hijr. This paper presents the excavation results and preliminary interpretations of BAP's winter 2022-23 field season, which targeted three areas of suspected Umm an-Nar period settlement in the Bat landscape within a 10 km radius of the oasis: "Operation A," al-Khutm Settlement, and Rakhat al-Madrh. In choosing to look beyond the site's oasis center and examine ancient occupation in three geographically distinct areas within the greater Bat landscape, this research sheds light on the diverse cultural processes and socioecological strategies practiced by the region's Umm an-Nar period inhabitants.
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