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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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The Bat Archaeological Project conducted its winter field season from December 26, 2022 until March 5, 2023. Our research focused on different areas of the Bat area’s Bronze Age archaeological landscape, including Rakhat Al Madrh, the Khutm Settlement, and the proposed location of the new Bat Visitors Center. At Rakhat Al Madrh, the team excavated three Umm an-Nar period houses. With assistance from a team of geomorphologists and geologists from the Sorbonne University, we also discovered that the houses were located around an ancient marsh/wetland where Umm an-Nar people likely experimented with early agriculture and pastured livestock. This ancient settlement is unlike any other known Early Bronze Age village or town in Arabia because of this environment. At Al Khutm, the team discovered and excavated Umm an-Nar houses and tombs and digitally mapped a very large fortress at the site dating to the Iron Age II. At the proposed location for the new Bat Visitors Center, we excavated and surveyed several mounds, which appear to be tombs that continue from the necropolis across the wadi. With the generous permission of the Ministry of Heritage and Tourism, laboratory analyses on geological, C-14, botanical, and ceramic samples collected this season are currently underway.
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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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