IAEA Workshop on Innovative Approaches of Accelerator Science and Technology for Sustainable Heritage Management

The Use of Nuclear Techniques for the Analysis of Archaeological Artefacts from The Early Bronze Age (3rd mill BC) Dahwa Site in Oman

14 Jun 2022, 14:00

20m

Board Room C (IAEA Headquarters)

ORAL Track 2: Interpretation, presentation and dissemination of the scientific results TC Asia-Pacific

Speaker

Mr Nasser Said Al-Jahwari (Sultan Qaboos University, Oman)

Description

Dahwa is an Early Bronze Age (EBA) (ca. 2600-2000BC) site located in the northern Al-Batinah region in Northern Oman. It has since 2014 been excavated by the Archaeology Department at Sultan Qaboos University, Oman. Five relatively large sites concentrated in one area around the modern village of Dahwa were uncovered, marked as DH1 and DH5-DH8. Two of these sites have been subject to excavations which exposed a settlement with well-preserved buildings including domestic structures, large building/warehouse and a small ritual building. Different types of artefacts, including metal and pottery, were found during the excavations in which the most important is a pair of circular copper-alloy cymbals with a diameter of 13.8cm. Analysis of two C14 charcoal samples collected from the building suggest a date falling in the third quarter of the third millennium BC.
This study discusses the results of radiation techniques employed for the analysis of artefacts from the site, including XRF, XRD, X-ray, CT-scan, Isotope, GPR and C14.