Umm an-Nar Ritual Building in Dahwa 1 (DH1), Northern Al-Batinah, Oman

Abstract

This article presents one of the earliest ritual buildings in the Oman Peninsula. This building was excavated at the settlement of Dahwa 1 (DH1) in 2017 and identified as S.20. The site of Dahwa 1 is located in the Batinah plain in the northeastern part of the Sultanate of Oman. It is one of the few relatively well-preserved domestic settlements in southeast Arabia and includes around seventeen differently sized buildings, dating to the Umm an–Nar period (ca. 2700–2000 BCE). Excavations revealed that S.20 differs from the other four excavated buildings at the settlement. Although building S.20 is the smallest one in the settlement, several factors such as the building location, its isolated setting, plan, size, construction, chronology, and finds led us to connect its function more to ritual than any other regular type of building.