Dating the pendant burials of north‐west Arabia: First radiometric results from the Khaybar Oasis, Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The monumental stone structures of the Arabian Peninsula have been notoriously difficult to date. Due to their visibility in the landscape, they have suffered from extensive robbing and later reuse, which has compromised dating methodologies. In particular, our understanding of when the elaborate “pendants” (also known as “tailed cairns” or “tailed tower tombs”) of north‐west Arabia were first constructed has remained incomplete. Recent work undertaken by the Aerial Archaeology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – Khaybar project provides some of the first radiometric dates for the pendants of Saudi Arabia. These structures can now be dated as far back as the third millennium BCE, revealing for the first time a hitherto undocumented, large‐scale, monumental funerary landscape dating to the Early Bronze Age. These radiocarbon dates bring the advent of the pendant building tradition in line with funerary developments across the wider Arabian Peninsula, and may mark a profound reconfiguring of the wider Harrat Khaybar landscape during the third millennium BCE.

Following the herds? A new distribution of hunting kites in Southwest Asia

“…A number of sites across the northern part of the distribution appear to have had various types of cairn tombs built over earlier kite structures, presumably re-using fabric from the kite. While simple cairn forms occur across a wide date range from the Neolithic onward, as demonstrated by work in Jubbah and in the southern Nafud (Groucutt et al, 2020; Guagnin et al, 2017a), the more complex pendant and ring tomb monuments can be broadly placed into the Bronze Age and later periods, with a recent excavation of a pendant in western Saudi Arabia providing a date range in the third millennium BCE (Kennedy et al, 2021). More frequent is the re-use of kite sites for the construction of amorphous walled enclosures, likely related to the corralling of livestock, which are rarely dated via fieldwork and sit within an even broader chronological span that may well stretch into the 20th century.…”

Landscapes of Mobility and Movement in North-West Arabia: A Remote Sensing Study of the Neom Impact Zone

“…Since this first survey, the area has only been subject to limited archaeological survey and investigation. This is particularly notable in comparison to investigations in the south of Jordan in areas such as Wadi Rum and Wadi Faynan [8][9][10][11] and more recent investment in heritage research around Khaybar and Al Ula in Saudi Arabia [12,13].…”

“…The imagery is systematically analysed, with any feature or group of features that are interpreted as being at least potentially archaeological recorded as a geospatial point. Features were primarily identified on the basis of site types (Figure 4) identified by previous studies and often investigated on the ground in both Jordan and Saudi Arabia [12,13,24,26]. It was not possible to conduct any ground survey within the confines of the present project which focuses on the cost-effective use of satellite remote sensing, but based on earlier fieldwork it is possible to be confident in the identification of morphologically distinct archaeological features.…”

“…Since this first survey, the area has only been subject to limited archaeological survey and investigation. This is particularly notable in comparison to investigations in the south of Jordan in areas such as Wadi Rum and Wadi Faynan [8][9][10][11] and more recent investment in heritage research around Khaybar and Al Ula in Saudi Arabia [12][13]. Recent years have seen surveys investigating palaeolithic evidence from across the coastal zone of the survey area, designed to better understand early hominids' dispersals out of Africa [14].…”

“…A far lower number of pendants and ringed cairns were recorded across the survey area, while a large concentration of ringed cairns in association with triangular enclosures is discussed in more detail below. Excavation of pendants and ringed cairns elsewhere has indicated a more probable Bronze Age period date of construction for these monuments [13].…”