Rock Art Research

The principal purposes of this paper are to report the preliminary results of analytical workconducted in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; to evaluate the susceptibility of some Arabian rock art todirect dating techniques; and to evaluate its susceptibility to the application of a variety of otherresearch methods. The authors have together studied more than forty rock art sites in northern, centraland southern Saudi Arabia, and they secured preliminary age estimations from ten motifs at seven ofthese locations. These are the first scientific rock art dating results ever reported in the Middle East.The teams of the Deputy Ministry of Antiquities and Museums included also specialists in epigraphyand indigenous Bedouin custodians. They examined site complexes considered for tourist access inthe context of associated resource management issues. In the Najran region of the country’s south,extensive research to test previously proposed stylistic chronologies of the petroglyph traditions ofsouthern Arabia was conducted. These were found to be not only internally inconsistent, they werealso decisively refuted by the results of dating work, superimposition sequences and precisioncolorimetric analyses.