Invisible Herders, Visible Traces: A Spatio-Chemical and Remote Sensing Approach to Deciphering Pastoral Landscapes in Dhofar, Oman

Mobile pastoral communities have inhabited Dhofar, Oman, for over seven millennia, yet they remain systematically underrepresented in the archaeological record due to minimal material traces and lack of permanent structures. As part of the CAMP project, which develops geo-ethnoarchaeological methods to define geochemical fingerprints of pastoral sites, this paper presents preliminary results from an integrated approach designed to address this detection gap. Altogether 1,441 soil samples were collected from 13 seasonal pastoral campsites and two vegetation control locations in the Khor Rori area and analysed using portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) spectrometry. Multi-element data were processed with Compositional Data Analysis (CoDA) and combined with satellite imagery to test whether pastoral activity markers are detectable from orbit. Geochemical results revealed distinctive signatures that differentiate pastoral activity areas from natural background, utilising geostatistical interpolation techniques—a step fundamental for the subsequent remote sensing analysis. Hyperspectral imagery from the Wyvern Dragonette constellation was fused with multispectral Sentinel-2 SWIR bands to overcome the spectral limitations of visible-range sensors. A Gradient Boosting model trained on the fused spectral data to predict anthropogenic enrichment regions achieved meaningful discrimination (ROC-AUC = 0.86). These preliminary findings suggest integrated geochemical-remote sensing approaches can enable landscape-scale detection of ephemeral pastoral campsites, though methodological refinement is needed.