Discovering al‑ʿUlā (AlUla): extensive landscape survey and targeted excavations in the al‑ʿUlā Core Area

Abstract

Until 2018 knowledge of al‑ʿUlā County’s archaeology had been limited to a few key sites. Since then, an extensive archaeological landscape survey has been conducted on behalf of the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) across a large area (3302 km2) centred in and around the al‑ʿUlā valley (excluding the oasis and the key heritage sites of Dadan, Ḥegrā (al‑Ḥijr), Qurḥ (al‑Mābiyāt), and Old Town), as a part of the broader Identification and Documentation of Immovable Heritage Assets (IDIHA) survey. The IDIHA project aims to identify heritage assets in advance of the anticipated increase in visitors and facilitate further research. Data collected through remote sensing and ground recording of sites has been integrated into a customized heritage geodatabase. Over 16,000 sites have been recorded in the main al‑ʿUlā valley over three years by the ground survey, demonstrating an intensive occupation of the area from the Palaeolithic through to the present, including a rich range of domestic, agro-pastoral (including water management), funerary, defensive, ritual/religious, infrastructure/transport, productive and hunting sites, as well as communication/artistic (rock art and inscriptions — the largest category in terms of overall numbers of sites). In parallel with the survey, targeted excavations explored a selection of mostly late prehistoric sites and feature types in order to develop an understanding of the chrono-cultural development of the landscape, adding considerable data to our knowledge of the archaeology of north-western Arabia.