Tombs in Time and Towers in Space: Making Sense of the Hafit-Umm an-Nar Transition in North-Central Oman Through its Monuments

This chapter considers both Hafit Period monumental tombs and Umm an-Nar towers that were developed during the Early Bronze Age in North-Central Oman. The author considers these monuments as communicative to the local community rather than emphasizing the messages that monumental architecture may have served for non-locals. While both monuments may have marked access to resources, they did so in opposite ways. Participation in the mortuary ritual provided access to the living via resources marked by the dead, whereas the tower limited access to water through social and physical exclusion. Simultaneously, these different types of monuments signaled two disparate social ideologies: in one case, group members may have sought to access and leverage specific resource nodes; and in the other, group members may have sought to leverage access to specific resources in order to control access to an entire network of resources.