New prehistoric sites in the southern Rub’ al-Khali desert, Oman

Jeffrey I. Rose , Yamandú H. Hilbert (1)

1 Archéorient - ARCHEORIENT - Environnements et sociétés de l'Orient ancien

The archaeology of the Rub’ al-Khali desert in Dhofar, southern Oman, is virtually unknown. The exception is a number of lithic scatters on interdunal gravels and at the edges of ancient palaeolakes recorded by geological surveyors in the early 1970s (Pullar 1974). These assemblages have been the fodder for considerable debate. Initially misclassified as North African Aterian (McClure 1994) and Levantine Pre-Pottery Neolithic (e.g. Dreschler 2007), recent work has shown that they belong to the ‘Nejd Leptolithic’ tradition, a local facies dated to between c. 13 000 and 7000 years ago (Hilbert et al. 2012; Charpentier & Crassard 2013). During winter 2012, the Ministry of Heritage and Culture in Oman commissioned an expedition to Ramlat Fasad, near the modern village of al-Hashman in the southern Rub’ al-Khali, Governorate of Dhofar, to further assess the temporal and geographical extent of past human habitation in this region.

Mots clés: Prehistoric sites; Oman; Lithic artefacts

Domaines: Archéologie et Préhistoire

Jeffrey I. Rose, Yamandú H. Hilbert. New prehistoric sites in the southern Rub’ al-Khali desert, Oman. Antiquity, 2014. ⟨hal-01295247⟩