Back to the Ḫawlān: a Geoarchaeological Remote Sensing Analysis of the Yemeni Highland Bronze Age

In 1981, the Italian archaeological Mission in the Republic of Yemen identified sites dating to the Yemeni Bronze Age during their work in the Ḫawlān area of the Yemeni highlands and, in doing so, first displayed the richness of a region that was still totally uncharted. Since then, over 40 years of international research on the 3rd–2nd millennia BCE throughout Yemen has recorded data from both architectonic (settlements and funerary panorama) and material culture points of view. This paper shares new remote sensing data of the Ḫawlān region to evaluate the state of settlements discovered in 1981 by Alessandro de Maigret and his team. Moreover, thanks to the availability of powerful satellite imagery instruments, this paper demonstrates that previously unrecorded information can be collected to enrich the knowledge of the Bronze Age in Yemen further.