Scavo d'emergenza per la salvaguardia del sito di RH-5, Sultanato dell'Oman. Rapporto preliminare

The Rh-5 site (Muscat-Oman) was highly excavated in the 1980s. This site is one of the most ancient villages of the Oman peninsula and testifies the development of human groups moving towards a complex economy favouring seasonal fishing, on the one hand, and specialised handcraft on the other. The site was cyclically inhabited by seasonal villages alternating with the development of a large necropolis. In 2005 an emergency excavation was carried out to deepen knowledge of the stratigraphy and, above all, to identify the extension of the necropolis. The present article provides the preliminary results of the latesta archaeological investigations in the light of previous studies. Moreover, during the emergency excavation, attention was particularly paid to the procedure of the archaeological survey as a fundamental part of the documentation, with the aim of virtually reconstructing the stratigraphy of the site., according to a method which could guaranty the possibility of recovering all archaeological information. The human traces and the materials recovered, fully coherent with those from the previous archaeological campaigns, could confirm human presence in the site during the second half of the 4. millennium BC.