sort has survived. A few of the grave goods are damaged, for whatever reason. Neither body painting nor tattooing survived. Who the person was affected how they were buried and the individual bits that made up their identity were represented in various ways. Regardless of their origin, as they are known today the Samad Late Iron Age population are date farmers and not herders, who migrate between winter and summer pasturage. However, there are several stages of transition from herders to settlers, from pastoralists to nomads and pastoral life is an essential part of farming. Aside from the catastrophic dentitions, the result of their diet, nothing in the graves reveals the economy either as farmers or as herdsmen. In the late 1st millennium BCE, the reference to this population as Bedouins is questionable. Disparate social ranks in the population contradict the usual lack of ranking within Bedouin tribal groups. Such accumulations of wealth arise more readily in a sedentary than pastoral environment. Not copies of tents, but rather of houses, the heavy stone graves show their makers' value for a sedentary kind of dwelling in the afterlife. Aside from males being supplied with weapons, the grave goods say little about the occupations of the two sexes. Evidently, both men and women spun thread. This population may be understood as migrants from South Arabia to Oman on the strength of an oral historical account (the Arabic Kashf al-Ghumma), written down centuries after the fact. However, the Kashf contains no real information, aside from a vague plot of Persian dominance and 'Omani' independence. Another reason to believe in a newly arrived population is the contrast of the Late Iron Age material culture with that of the indigenous Early Iron Age population. The Late Iron Age differs in terms of pottery from that distributed in central Oman and in the neighbouring present-day United Arab Emirates. Significantly, razors occur in the Early Iron Age contexts, but not in the succeeding ones. The traditional explanation of a diaspora '2000 years before the coming of Islam ‒ after God had Sabʿāʾ flooded', is apocryphal. Evidence appears in absolute terms from c. 100 BCE to c. 300 CE to date the relative chronological Samad Late Iron Age. Given the relative small amount of research, it is not possible to prove the transition from the Early Iron Age in absolute terms, which is often considered to end around