Inshore or offshore? The Neolithic fishermen of Ra’s al-Hamra (RH-6, RH-5, Muscat, Sultanate of Oman)

International audienceRa's al-Hamra 6 (RH-6) and Ra's al-Hamra 5 (RH-5) are two of the most important Neolithic coastal sites in the Sultanate of Oman. Located in the capital Muscat, they have supplied an important corpus of fish bones and revealed a high taxonomic richness in the different assemblages. The results provided information on fishing practices that held an important role in the subsistence strategies of the inhabitants during the two millennia of occupation (6 th-4 th millennia BC). Pelagic species (jacks and kawakawa/tunas) were largely dominant throughout both occupations, calling into question the interpretation of inshore or offshore fishing; these fish could have been caught with a hook-and-line or by setting nets at a reasonable distance from the coast. However, the inhabitants also had to supplement this subsistence by catching demersal fish and small fish, caught from the cliff, in the estuary or the mangrove. At both sites, the inhabitants clearly exploited the different nearby inshore environments: coastal open water, reefs, estuary and mangrove. Moreover, the high fish richness (69 genera at RH-6; 35 genera at RH-5) indicates that both sites could have been occupied on a year-round basis. INTRODUCTION Many shell middens have been identified in South Eastern Arabia for the Middle Holocene (7th-4th millennia), and the important economic role of aquatic resources is well established (e.g., Beech 2004; Biagi 1994, 2006). Fishing does appear to have been important to these populations, described as fisher-hunter-gatherer communities (Charpentier 2008; Cleuziou and Tosi 2007; Cleuziou 2005), yet surprisingly, fish remains from only a few sites in Oman hav