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Middle East Geoglyphs & Stone Structures ('Wheels'; 'Kites'; Etc.)

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Visible Only From Above, Mystifying 'Nazca Lines' Discovered in Mideast

Owen Jarus, LiveScience Contributor
Date: 14 September 2011 Time: 10:33 AM ET

They stretch from Syria to Saudi Arabia, can be seen from the air but not the ground, and are virtually unknown to the public.

They are the Middle East's own version of the Nazca Lines — ancient "geolyphs," or drawings, that span deserts in southern Peru — and now, thanks to new satellite-mapping technologies, and an aerial photography program in Jordan, researchers are discovering more of them than ever before. They number well into the thousands.

Referred to by archaeologists as "wheels," these stone structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with spokes radiating inside. Researchers believe that they date back to antiquity, at least 2,000 years ago. They are often found on lava fields and range from 82 feet to 230 feet (25 meters to 70 meters) across. [See gallery of wheel structures]

"In Jordan alone we've got stone-built structures that are far more numerous than (the) Nazca Lines, far more extensive in the area that they cover, and far older," said David Kennedy, a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Western Australia.

Kennedy's new research, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, reveals that these wheels form part of a variety of stone landscapes. These include kites (stone structures used for funnelling and killing animals); pendants (lines of stone cairns that run from burials); and walls, mysterious structures that meander across the landscape for up to several hundred feet and have no apparent practical use.

His team's studies are part of a long-term aerial reconnaissance project that is looking at archaeological sites across Jordan. As of now, Kennedy and his colleagues are puzzled as to what the structures may have been used for or what meaning they held. [History's Most Overlooked Mysteries]

Fascinating structures

Kennedy's main area of expertise is in Roman archaeology, but he became fascinated by these structures when, as a student, he read accounts of Royal Air Force pilots flying over them in the 1920s on airmail routes across Jordan. "You can't not be fascinated by these things," Kennedy said.

Indeed, in 1927 RAF Flight Lt. Percy Maitland published an account of the ruins in the journal Antiquity. He reported encountering them over "lava country" and said that they, along with the other stone structures, are known to the Bedouin as the "works of the old men."

Kennedy and his team have been studying the structures using aerial photography and Google Earth, as the wheels are hard to pick up from the ground, Kennedy said.

"Sometimes when you're actually there on the site you can make out something of a pattern but not very easily," he said. "Whereas if you go up just a hundred feet or so it, for me, comes sharply into focus what the shape is."

The designs must have been clearer when they were originally built. "People have probably walked over them, walked past them, for centuries, millennia, without having any clear idea what the shape was."


What were they used for?

So far, none of the wheels appears to have been excavated, something that makes dating them, and finding out their purpose, more difficult. Archaeologists studying them in the pre-Google Earth era speculated that they could be the remains of houses or cemeteries. Kennedy said that neither of these explanations seems to work out well.

"There seems to be some overarching cultural continuum in this area in which people felt there was a need to build structures that were circular."

Some of the wheels are found in isolation while others are clustered together. At one location, near the Azraq Oasis, hundreds of them can be found clustered into a dozen groups. "Some of these collections around Azraq are really quite remarkable," Kennedy said.

In Saudi Arabia, Kennedy's team has found wheel styles that are quite different: Some are rectangular and are not wheels at all; others are circular but contain two spokes forming a bar often aligned in the same direction that the sun rises and sets in the Middle East.

The ones in Jordan and Syria, on the other hand, have numerous spokes and do not seem to be aligned with any astronomical phenomena. "On looking at large numbers of these, over a number of years, I wasn't struck by any pattern in the way in which the spokes were laid out," Kennedy said.

Cairns are often found associated with the wheels. Sometimes they circle the perimeter of the wheel, other times they are in among the spokes. In Saudi Arabia some of the cairns look, from the air, like they are associated with ancient burials.

Dating the wheels is difficult, since they appear to be prehistoric, but could date to as recently as 2,000 years ago. The researchers have noted that the wheels are often found on top of kites, which date as far back as 9,000 years, but never vice versa. "That suggests that wheels are more recent than the kites," Kennedy said.

Amelia Sparavigna, a physics professor at Politecnico di Torino in Italy, told Live Science in an email that she agrees these structures can be referred to as geoglyphs in the same way as the Nazca Lines are. "If we define a 'geoglyph' as a wide sign on the ground of artificial origin, the stone circles are geoglyphs," Sparavignawrote in her email.

The function of the wheels may also have been similar to the enigmatic drawings in the Nazca desert. [Science as Art: A Gallery]

"If we consider, more generally, the stone circles as worship places of ancestors, or places for rituals connected with astronomical events or with seasons, they could have the same function of [the] geoglyphs of South America, the Nazca Lines for instance. The design is different, but the function could be the same," she wrote in her email.

Kennedy said that for now the meaning of the wheels remains a mystery. "The question is what was the purpose?"

SOURCE: http://www.livescience.com/16046-nazca- ... earth.html

Also: http://news.yahoo.com/visible-only-abov ... 06688.html
 
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Ten identical stone circles so huge they cannot be seen from the ground have been captured in perfect detail by archeologists flying over Jordan. The purpose of the structures, built thousands of years ago, has stumped academics.

“These are not natural things. Occasionally we have found artifacts nearby…. They can’t just be a coincidence. There’s some purpose behind it. But we can’t figure out what it is,” said an email to the media by David Kennedy, a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Western Australia, who has led a research project that has extensively photographed ancient Levant sites from the air since 1997. ...

http://rt.com/news/203287-jordan-stone-circles-aerial/

Images at link above.

More info here: http://www.apaame.org/2014/10/research- ... icity.html
 
This discovery of a 9,000 year old shrine including 'kite' symbology would seemingly push the age of these Jordanian stone structures back to the late Neolithic.
Archaeologists find 9,000-year-old shrine in Jordan desert

A team of Jordanian and French archaeologists said Tuesday that it had found a roughly 9,000-year-old shrine at a remote Neolithic site in Jordan’s eastern desert.

The ritual complex was found in a Neolithic campsite near large structures known as “desert kites,” or mass traps that are believed to have been used to corral wild gazelles for slaughter.

Such traps consist of two or more long stone walls converging toward an enclosure and are found scattered across the deserts of the Middle East.

“The site is unique, first because of its preservation state,” said Jordanian archaeologist Wael Abu-Azziza, co-director of the project. “It’s 9,000 years old and everything was almost intact.”

Within the shrine were two carved standing stones bearing anthropomorphic figures, one accompanied by a representation of the “desert kite,” as well as an altar, hearth, marine shells and miniature model of the gazelle trap. ...
SOURCE: https://apnews.com/article/science-middle-east-jordan-amman-deserts-983cab8ea9ee86942da59dd41308286d
 
Mystery of structures resembling kites from prehistoric times finally cracked


After a century of research, archaeologists from the University of Haifa, the University of Western Australia, and France’s National Centre for Scientific Research have recently discovered that mysterious shapes in the desert resembling "kites" were actually meant to act as mega-traps to isolate large herds of animals before they met their fates.

269087


A kite by Kibbutz Samar, where two undulating walls are leading towards the round head. An Early Bronze Age grave (tumulus) was later built on top of the kite, and we found in it human and cattle bones, tiny beads and a stele.
(photo credit: UNIVERSITY OF HAIFA)


Scattered throughout deserts across the Middle East, large structures that look like kites if you see them from above left behind by humans of the neolithic era have led archaeologists to question their structural purposes for nearly a century.

There are at least 6,500 of these archaeological marvels worldwide. The Negev is home to some, Saudi Arabia's counting theirs, even Australia has many to count. The earliest "kites" are recorded in Jordan dating back around 10,000 years, with others popping up across the globe as recently as 6,000 years ago.

https://m.jpost.com/archaeology/article-724495

maximus otter
 
I know nothing about archaeology, nor ancient civilizations, but some of those pictures look like things being sorted or counted.

Maps? Even though we can't see them well except from the air, the people designing them would know they were there. According to the one article, "wheels" have been designed over "kites", but not the other way around.

The kites have been identified as areas to round up animals. What if the wheels had to do with what animals were in that area for hunting, or that the animals had moved on and the wheels covering a now disused kite (because of animal migration or extermination) and the wheels indicate, like a map, where the animals have migrated to?

Nomadic people have had many ways of communicating throughout history. Just because we can't see them at ground level, doesn't mean that they needed to view them that way. They would know they are there and maybe walked the area "reading" the wheels.

Most likely totally out of left field, but just me pondering.
 
The earliest blueprints.

Two large, engraved stones found in the Middle East display the oldest known building plans drawn to scale, researchers say.

One carved depiction covers part of a rectangular stone found at a Jordanian campsite dating to about 9,000 years ago. Two other engravings were made roughly 8,000 years ago on a boulder discovered at the base of a cliff in Saudi Arabia.

Carvings on these stones depict nearby desert kites, massive structures once used to capture animal herds, scientists report May 17 in PLOS ONE. Desert kites consist of stone walls up to five kilometers long that narrow into large enclosures surrounded by pits where hunters trapped animals, such as gazelles and deer (SN: 4/18/11). Kite depictions at the two sites closely resemble the shape, layout and proportions of desert kites found close by, archaeologist Rémy Crassard and colleagues say.

Scale drawings etched in rock may have served as maps that helped hunters plan strategies for driving animal herds into specific desert kites, the scientists report. These engravings might also have been blueprints for building desert kites, or public displays of their makers’ ability to transfer large, 3-D structures onto small, flat surfaces.

Two images side by side. The image on the left is a photo of the rectangular rock found in Jordan with a faint engraving and several circles. The image on the right is an illustration of the same square rock with the engraving outlined and more visible.


A rectangular stone found at a Jordanian site (left) contains a roughly 9,000-year-old engraving (shown illustrated in outline at right) that accurately portrays the shape and proportions of a nearby desert kite.SEBAP AND R. CRASSARD ET AL/PLOS ONE 2023


As farming and animal domestication took root in parts of the Middle East, regional hunting groups that built desert kites to trap wild animal herds maintained a special regard for massive hunting structures, says Crassard, of the French National Center for Scientific Research in Lyon.

Other ancient maps and structural plans, intended as scaled-down drawings, date to about 4,300 years ago in Mesopotamia. Those depictions, Crassard says, were not as accurate as the newly discovered desert kite engravings.

https://www.sciencealert.com/8000-y...-be-the-oldest-examples-of-construction-plans
 
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