2021/03/18 by Hugh Thomas, Melissa Kennedy, Jane McMahon +5 · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Earth and Planetary Sciences · Social Sciences · #Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies #Archaeology and ancient environmental studies #Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology
paper · doi:10.1080/00934690.2021.1892323
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.