Metal artefacts and archaeometallurgical analyses

The rescue excavation of the Qarn al-Harf tombs produced a small but significant assemblage of metal artefacts in copper, copper alloys, silver, and electrum. Given the evidence of extensive disturbance and robbing of these tombs in antiquity, it is clear that the metal artefacts recovered from the tombs are but a small, possibly unrepresentative, subset of the metal originally interred with burials at the site. Excavations of Bronze and Iron Age burials in the region, for example at Dibba al-Baya in the hinterland of the port of Dibba (Genchi et al. 2018), at Qattarah near Al Ain (unpublished data from Al Ain Museum), and at Qidfa in Fujairah (Im-Obersteg 1987; Corboud et al. 1988: 16–17), indicate that the collective burial chambers of later prehistoric Southeast Arabia could each originally have contained many hundreds of copper-base and precious metal artefacts.

Nevertheless, there is much to be learned from the detailed study of this small assemblage of material. Initially, this chapter presents a typo-chronological study of the metal artefacts from the Qarn al-Harf tombs, placing them into the broader archaeological and artefactual context of Southeast Arabia in the Wadi Suq period (c.2000–1600 BC) and Late Bronze Age (c.1600–1250 BC). Subsequently, the results of a series of scientific investigations of the artefacts are presented, including a range of compositional, microstructural, and isotopic analyses. The data generated by these techniques, when integrated with analyses of contemporaneous metal assemblages from sites across Southeast Arabia, facilitate consideration of raw material exploitation, alloying technologies, artefact fabrication, provenance, and exchange. These archaeometallurgical analyses, on their own and in tandem with studies of other material remains from Qarn al-Harf, offer important insights into broader aspects of society in Southeast Arabia in the 2nd millennium BC.