The Khaybar oasis, in northwestern Arabia, is renowned in Islamic history for the battle that took place there in 7 AH/ 628 AD, an important early victory for the prophet Muhammad’s armies in Arabia over the local Jewish tribes, and for being the first recorded instance of the waqf, the Islamic religious endowment. In subsequent centuries Khaybar went less remarked, then, in 2020, the Khaybar Longue Durée Archaeological Project began revealing new faces of Khaybar’s Islamic history. Financed by the Royal Commission for AlUla and the Agence française pour le développement d’AlUla, extensive survey over a 56 km2 area, as well as targeted soundings at key sites, began to reveal not only continuity of occupation from the pre-Islamic period into the Early Islamic era, but also from the Abbasid period, which, potentially, represents a major reorganisation and expansion in settlement and agricultural lands. Significant hydro-agricultural developments are likely to date from this time, along with the creation of two new settlements — in the oasis core and on its periphery — and a change in defence strategy. This season (autumn 2022) two test trenches were opened in the congregational mosque of Bishr, revealing an Early Islamic foundation with multiple later phases of use : this may correlate to the Mosque of the Prophet, referred to by medieval sources. Medieval occupation in Khaybar is represented principally by surface ceramics, including imported pottery from Egypt and Syria, and the identification of fortified village sites. The Ottoman period sees major shifts, notably the presence of large enclosure systems used by the ‘Anaza Bedouin for processing dates into a portable commodity, the marabid, and in the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, the building of new fortified sites in the oasis core. This led to more de-nucleated settlement distribution which culminated in the foundation of modern Khaybar, to the south of the oasis, in 1979.
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