A note on at-Tuwayr, an Eastern Nabataean site ?

International audienceThe small settlement of aṭ-Ṭuwayr, located 34 km east of the ancient oasis of Dūmat in northern Arabia, experienced a dense occupation during the 1st century BC, as shown by the initial research led by the Saudi Comprehensive Survey in the 1970s and two test trenches carried out in 1986. Thanks to these studies and the recent collect of pottery sherds on surface, we suggest that aṭ-Ṭuwayr constituted a ‘Nabataean’ site characteristic of the ‘East’. We base this hypothesis on both the functional complementarity of the ceramic assemblages: Nabataean vessels for service, consumption and cooking, and local storage vessels produced locally. We here envisage that the intense trans-Arabian trade between Transjordan and northern Arabia has led to the mixing of Nabataean and local pottery traditions suggesting that a local “eastern” Nabataean population inhabited aṭ-Ṭuwayr during the 1st century BC at the very latest