Softstone Vessels from Ḫor Al-Hamām. Rescue Archaeology and Remote Sensing in Al-Bāṭinah North

The aim of this paper is to introduce the results of a rescue archaeology procedure that took place in Ḫor al-Hamām, in the Al Batinah North Governorate, in 2010 and 2019, under the patronage of the Ministry of Heritage and Tourism, Sultanate of Oman (MHT). A rich set of materials was collected within an agricultural field later on extensively built up. Although comparable with other corpora of materials excavated in south-eastern Arabia, the assemblage of Ḫor al-Hamām stands out for the inner variety of the different artefacts’ classes, which also includes copper weapons and pottery vessel, and their chronological heterogeneity: Wādī Suq period (1900-1600 BCE) and Late Bronze Age (1600-1300 BCE). Focusing on the softstones, this paper is also addressed to contextualize these materials in their paleo-environment, by a remote sensing geoarchaeological approach for the definition of the archaeological landscapes between Ṣaḥam and its inner land, Fulayj al-Ḥarṯ.