New Paper: Tracing prehistoric pastoral occupation in Dhofar: new chronological, archaeological and faunal insights from Laheem, southern Oman
Kia ora,
The research team that I am part of just last week had a new open access research paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. Although this is not directly related to my current PhD research, I did make a small contribution to this research, which was led by colleagues who are based at the University of Tübingen in Germany, and was kindly included among the paper's co-authors (not always a given in academia!). This blog post will give a general background and summary of the paper, which those that are interested can build upon by checking out the paper via the hyperlink above (again, it's open access!).
A couple of posts back, when I introduced my broad PhD topic (the Pleistocene/Palaeolithic archaeological record of southern Arabia) I noted that modern weather systems bring seasonal monsoon rains to parts of southern Arabia. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Dhofar mountains and Salalah coastal plains in southern Oman, where the tail-end of the Indian Ocean Summer Monsoon system brings heavy rainfall and thick fog to the region during the summer months, creating a fairly unique local 'micro-climate'.
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| View of the Dhofar Mountains (southern Oman) during the summer wet season. Source of image: Rose, 2022. |
The periodic intensification and northward expansion of these modern weather systems in the past would have transformed parts of the now hyper-arid (dry) interior desert regions of Arabia into environments that were more accommodating for large-bodied water dependent animals such as hippos and humans.
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| A hippopotamus. At times in the distant past the interior desert regions of Arabia were wet enough that these semi-aquatic animals lived there, alongside people. Photo by Muhammad Mahdi Karim. CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=121282994 |
From an archaeological perspective, particular interest has been paid to the pre-Neolithic record of the Dhofar mountains area, given its relative climatic stability and a hypothesised role as an ecological 'refugium' for human populations during past climate downturns elsewhere in Arabia - especially during a period called the Last Glacial Maximum around 20,000 years ago, when hyper-arid deserts expanded to their maximum extent, severely constraining areas where people could comfortably live.
In the new paper, our focus is on a later (more recent) period of time. We report an approximately 4-metre deep late Neolithic-to-Bronze Age sequence at a new site in the Dhofar mountains. Based on radiocarbon (C14) dating, this sequence dates from around 6500 years ago (ca. 4500 BC/BCE) to around 3000 BP (1000 BC/BCE). The site, Laheem, is remarkable within the known Arabian Neolithic record in terms of the richness of preserved faunal material (animal bones) and therefore has the potential to provide important insights into subsistence practices and the development of traditional herding practices that persist in the region today. The Arabian Neolithic is largely known only from megalithic (large stone) structures and flint-knapping sites in areas where there is often quite poor preservation of organic remains.
The Laheem site is located c. 673 m.s.l (metres above sea level) in the Dhofar mountains, Oman. We excavated the site during my first field season with the team in Oman in October 2024. Located within a natural fissure/cleft in a large limestone outcrop, and surrounded by steep limestone cliffs, this site was identified as a place in the landscape where very deep sediments had the potential to accumulate and therefore was targeted by a research team that was primarily motivated to find OLD (Pleistocene) archaeology. In fact, it was hoped that we would find some stratified Palaeolithic archaeology that could then be incorporated into my PhD research.
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| The Laheem site prior to the start of excavation in October 2024. My PhD supervisor, Matthew Meredith-Williams is explaining the site, which was initially located during ground survey in the area the previous year. The branches to his left sit on top of a backfilled test pit opened up when the site was first located and which had revealed the presence of some typical Bronze-Age period (ca. 3000-1000 BC/BCE) lithics less than a metre below the ground surface. Photo by author. |
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| Excavation in progress at Laheem. Photo by author. |
Alas, we never found that stratified Palaeolithic archaeology (don't worry about me - we've found other sites with plenty of Palaeolithic material for me to look at for my PhD!). But we were right about the potential for deep deposits. We got down to just over 6 m at the maximum depth of the excavations, without hitting bedrock, but that was a less than 1 x 1 m area, with all the stepping we had to do around that area (for - hopefully - obvious health and safety reasons) also taking quite a bit of time. So maybe there was Palaeolithic archaeology there somewhere - and possibly if we'd actually dug a metre or more further north or south we would have found it! Oh well - that's the thing about archaeology - you simply can't dig everything up, especially if you're taking the time to properly record context during the process, which of course all archaeologists should be doing - otherwise we're no better than treasure hunters/fossickers!
With regards to the late Neolithic-to-Bronze Age archaeological sequence that we did find, our team's conclusions are that activities at the site were ephemeral - with sporadic, repeated use of the site rather than permanent sustained settlement over a long period of time. This is generally consistent with activity today in the local area, where the site's surrounds are used as pasture for camels and cows by local herders. The steep limestone cliffs certainly provided some welcome shelter from the heavy sun and wind for much of the day during the excavation - it was quite pleasant compared to other sites in Oman that I've now excavated at!
The repeated identification of fires (hearth features), the anthropogenic modification of the large faunal assemblage (e.g. butchery marks on animal bone) and identified usewear on the lithics (probably ad-hoc tools) that were recovered indicate that the Laheem site was likely used repeatedly as a camp site where animal carcasses were processed.
P.S. Usewear is pretty cool - different types of activities (e.g. sawing and scraping) on different types of material (e.g. bone vs wood or other plant matter) with the sharp edges of stone flakes can leave some characteristic damage on those edges in the forms of tiny (sometimes microscopic) flakes, the nature of which can potentially (under the right conditions) inform us about the type of activities the flake was used for.
The identified species present, based on the animal bone assemblage - indicated a dominance of domesticated species, particularly caprines (sheep/goats) and cattle. I've actually touched on zooarchaeological identification methods in a previous blog post if any readers are interested in delving a bit more into this. You can also check out our paper for more information specific to this particular study. What we found generally aligns with broader regional patterns in Arabia. For example, cattle, sheep and goats were all part of South Arabian pastoral economies by the sixth millennium BC/BCE. Owing to their ecological adaptability and utility for mobile pastoralism, caprines in particular were probably quite successful in more arid areas with less predictable water and forage availability. Based on current evidence, camels appear to have been a later introduction and - despite their common presence in the region today - were in fact were not represented at all in the Laheem assemblage. In fact no elements from very large (body size >500 kg) ungulates - and therefore potential camels - were present!
If this post has whetted your appetite, you can check out our article for more details:
Hilbert, Y. H. et al. 2026. Tracing prehistoric pastoral occupation in Dhofar: New Chronological, archaeological and faunal insights from Laheem, southern Oman. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports
And, as always, thanks for reading this blog,
Nick
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