Pictures of a Society. Report on the 2023 field season on rock art studies in the Wilayat Al-Mudhaybi, Sultanate of Oman

Especially in regions where a mobile lifestyle is dominant, rock art offers an indispensable source for archaeological work. This new three-year research project funded by the Fritz Thyssen foundation studies the role of rock art in the north of the Oman Peninsula, from Neolithic to modern times, in order to draw conclusions about the socio-cultural, political and economic developments of the societies from a diachronic perspective. During the first field season of 2023, rock art sites in the Wilayat Al-Mudhaybi, among others, will be documented, using SfM and RTI technologies. Additionally, a smartphone app will be launched that allows people in Oman to support the documentation of rock art sites as a citizen science component of the project. This app is being developed in collaboration with Mark Turner and Imre Draskovits from Newcastle University. The inclusion of the local population makes it possible to effectively obtain a sufficiently large and thus empirically evaluable data basis in the large study area, especially with regard to the spatial distribution of the rock images. This poster presents the outcomes of the 2023 field season.