Archaeologists from Jordan and Saudi Arabia have found what they believe to be by far the oldest architectural interpretations anywhere in the world. The stone carvings, made between 7,000 and 9,000 years ago, depict “desert kites,” landscape-scale traps built by early humans to hunt herd animals.
The engravings show the Neolithic structures, which the authors say were likely of critical importance to the societies that built them, with the kind of precision that would normally only be possible from the air. Both objects were found in 2015 and a study of them was published this month in the journal PLOS ONE. No other artifacts from this period show such mental mastery of spatial perception, the authors say.
“It’s amazing to know and show that they were able to have this mental conceptualization of very large spaces and put it on a smaller surface,” said Rémy Crassard, archaeologist at the National Center for Scientific Research and responsible for the article. author, tell New York Times.
An engraved stone discovered in Jibal al-Khashabiyeh, Jordan. Courtesy of PLoS ONE.
More than 6,200 of these “desert kite” structures have been found, from the Middle East to Central Asia. They were probably used as enclosures in which hunters could more easily contain and kill animals like gazelles, with pits as deep as 13 feet surrounding the edges for any creatures that tried to escape. They are most common in southern Syria, eastern Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia, according to research by Crassard and his colleagues, carried out as part of the project. Globalkites.
According to the authors, only a few plans or maps of these large man-made structures survived before the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. And while other carvings showing kites had been discovered, they could not be linked to specific structures.
The two new scale carvings were found in the Jibal al-Khashabiyeh region, east of the Al-Jafr basin in Jordan, and on the Jebel az-Zilliyat plateau of the Nefud desert in Saudi Arabia. , separated by about 166 miles.
AT Jibal al-Khashabiyeh, the engraving, in bas-relief, was found on a 200-pound, 31-inch block of limestone. It was discovered during a pedestrian survey of a plateau drainage feature. The “lead lines”, along which the animals were probably herded, extend about 16 inches and lead to a star-shaped enclosure nearly a foot long, with pits up to two inches wide . A mysterious graphic pattern nearby, according to the authors, may represent an unpreserved part of the trap, such as a net.
The Jebel az-Zilliyat engraving was found on a rock 12.5 feet long and has leading lines nearly three feet long, leading to a star-shaped enclosure about two feet wide .
Without excluding it, the authors hypothesize that the engravings were less likely to be used to plan the structures, since the major topographical elements are not represented. More likely, they write, the engraving was used to help organize the collective hunt, determining, for example, how many hunters would be involved and where they would be stationed, and to coordinate their actions.
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