A look at shell-midden and cemetery sites discovered in Oman that date back to the fifth millenium BCE, testifying to the levels of development in areas around the Indus Valley civilization thousands of years before it reached its peak. >
"The discovery of Indus seals manufactured with non-Indus raw materials, but with tools and techniques associated with Indus productions, further supports the idea that merchants and craftsmen from the greater Indus Valley were living and working at interior settlements in the Oman peninsula." >
A must-read paper. Dennys Frenez classifies and nicely illustrates recent finds in the Oman Peninsula connecting it to the Indus civilization in multiple ways. >
"Recent discoveries of Indus and Indus related materials at sites in the interior, and a general reassessment of comparable materials throughout Oman, suggest a more complex model of interaction. . . these artefacts probably reflect the presence of small groups of Indus merchants and craftspeople integrated into local communities and directly involved with important socioeconomic activities." >
"The scope of this paper is to update and discuss the available evidence for prehistoric fishing along the Arabian Sea coasts of the Sultanate of Oman, Las Bela and Sindh in Pakistan," write the authors. By prehistoric they mean going back to at least the 7th millennium BCE (7000-6000 BCE). >
"A wide range of Indus artefacts have been found over the past forty years at many coastal and inland sites in the Oman peninsula, including utilitarian and ritual pottery, ornaments, seals, weights and, more recently, terracotta toys for children," write the authors. >
A detailed look at carnelian and agate sources and manufacture throughout the Gulf region, and how many of the beads found show clear evidence of ancient Indus manufacturing techniques. As the authors write: "Recent studies using more refined techniques of morphological and technological analysis c… >
"In this paper," write the authors, "we present the preliminary results of a long-term and multifaceted study of the role of craft specialists and traders who were present in ancient Magan during the 5th-1st millennia BCE (Table 1), with a specific focus on beads found at sites in modern Oman, and … >
A Sherlock Holmes-style investigation into over four thousand year old pots to determine, as best as modern lipid residue analysis allows, the foodstuffs that they once held to draw a bigger and better picture of food practices on the Arabian Gulf during the so-called Umm an-Nar period (ca. 2700-2000 BCE). Many of these pots were imported ancient Indus Black-Slipped Jars. >
Sometimes you have to find something far away to understand something nearby. This seems to be the case with the discovery of a complete set of copper cymbals in Oman, which have allowed archaeologists to be much more sure that similar finds of only one cymbal in Mohenjo-daro and elsewhere were actually musical instruments. >
