From 2014 Italian team, directed by Sabatino Laurenza, worked in the Sultanate of Oman for rescue
archaeological excavations for roads construction. The excavations on the Batinah Expressway alignment in
Sohar area touched three graveyards with different typologies of graves and with materials of different periods
(from Bronze age to Sasanian and early Islamic). The results pushed us to apply a new approach to the “funerary
landscape” study of the region.
In this paper we present the “funerary landscape” as a specific type of archaeological landscape, focusing on a
“mapscape” of the funerary sites and a detailed account of graves typologies and funerary finds (burialscape) and
the relations between burials, disposal of the graves in the environment (funeraryscape) and the social memory
of the group participating in the remembrance of the burial, through a series of standardized uses (i.e. graves
organized in large groups over wide area, the repeated disposal of the dead in the same place, etc.). Those and
other aspects let the area to become a place of remembrance of persons in a community’s social memory, reflecting
the subscription of several communities to a similar set of guiding principles for creating and maintaining
social memory.
