Recent excavations undertaken by the Aerial Archaeology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (AAKSA) project have recovered significant skeletal material, evidence for funerary offerings, including jewelry, and the earliest chronometrically dated domestic dog in the Arabian Peninsula. Despite being heavily disturbed by recent looting, these monumental funerary structures were found to be collective burials dating to the 5th and 4th millennia B.C. The evidence recovered from these graves provides new insight into the social and funerary landscapes of northwestern Arabia during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods, shedding light upon issues of social memory, territoriality, and monumentality in the Middle Holocene of the Arabian Peninsula.

Since the 1970s, monumental stone structures now called mustatil have been documented across Saudi Arabia. However, it was not until 2017 that the first intensive and systematic study of this structure type was undertaken, although this study could not determine the precise function of these features. Recent excavations in AlUla have now determined that these structures fulfilled a ritual purpose, with specifically selected elements of both wild and domestic taxa deposited around a betyl. This paper outlines the results of the University of Western Australia’s work at site IDIHA-0008222, a 140 m long mustatil (IDIHA-F-0011081), located 55 km east of AlUla. Work at this site sheds new and important light on the cult, herding and ‘pilgrimage’ in the Late Neolithic of north-west Arabia, with the site revealing one of the earliest chronometrically dated betyls in the Arabian Peninsula and some of the earliest evidence for domestic cattle in northern Arabia.

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This paper presents new results of the study of the faunal remains from the Iron Age site of Husn Salut (Oman). The archaeofauna from one specific building—named Basement—was analyzed. This building was occupied during the last quarter of the second millennium BC and hosted collective activities. Our research focused on the remains discovered inside a pit (Husn Salut–US35) interpreted by the excavators as evidence for a ceremony connected with the archi- tectural renewal of the area: pottery shapes belong to types usually related to banquets and possibly rituals. The pit contained remains of at least fourteen goats (mainly females) four sheep, and two caprines. Adult animals predominate and butchery marks attest to the dismemberment and filleting of carcasses. The assemblage documents that collective consumption of mainly goat and some sheep meat was part of the ceremony. However, compared to the faunal remains from the entire Basement, the fauna from the pit shows no major differences: as such, the interpretation of the pit must derive from a comprehensive study of the context. These results indicate that the assemblage from the pit mirrors local herd management, aimed at secondary products, rather than a specific selection of animals for ceremonial activities.

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