Revisiting ‘Settlement’: A case study of terminology and Early Bronze Age southeast Arabia

Abstract

The settlement—a place on a landscape where a human group lives and interacts—has become such a fundamental social and material concept in archaeology that it is rarely explicitly defined. The breadth of meaning built into the term allows it to transcend regional, temporal, and contextual differences in site form, size, and composition. However, just as this combination of versatility and implied meaning makes settlement applicable to archaeological studies worldwide, it also creates conditions in which the term’s social significance may be overlooked or where it may be misapplied in ways that lead to false equivalencies and mischaracterizations. Through a literary review of research on Umm an-Nar period (UaN; ca. 2700–2000 BCE) sites of the Oman Peninsula, this paper examines the ways in which broad (mis)applications of the term ‘settlement’ can deeply impact scholarly understanding of an ancient society. Inconsistencies in UaN settlement identification—born of regional variations in the archaeological record, coarse temporal clarity, and the history of scholarship in southeast Arabia—are shown to have significant ramifications for how UaN society is analyzed, interpreted, and characterized in archaeological literature. It is argued that settlement-focused archaeological studies would universally benefit from explicit definition(s) of the term and greater precision in its application.