Now, archaeologists have uncovered nearly 400 previously undocumented stone structures they call “gates” in the Arabian desert that they believe may have been built by nomadic tribes thousands of years ago.
“We tend to think of Saudi Arabia as desert, but in practice there’s a huge archaeological treasure trove out there and it needs to be identified and mapped,” said David Kennedy, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia and author of a paper set to appear in the November issue of the journal Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy.
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The most well-known of the basalt boulder structures are the “kites,” which were first identified by air pilots in the 1920s. Each looks like a child’s kite, complete with strings and long fluttering tails that are two-dimensionally flattened into the ground.
Archaeologists think ancient nomadic tribes used the kites, which can be more than a mile long, for hunting. The structure’s two long converging walls would funnel stampedes of gazelles into the body of the kite, where they would be slaughtered.
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“Absolute bafflement.” That’s what Dr. Kennedy said he felt when he first saw the satellite images. Suddenly, he was confronted with structures quite different from anything he had ever seen before. He called them gates because when looked at horizontally, they resemble a simple fence with two thick upright posts on the sides connected by one or more long bars.
“They don’t look like funerary, for disposing of dead bodies. They don’t look like structures where people lived, and they don’t look like animal traps,” he said. “I don’t know what they are.”
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For nearly a decade, he has painstakingly cataloged nearly 400 gates. In 2011, his work was featured by Google in a video (for which he was paid). The longest gate he had identified was more than 1,600 feet long, though most were between 160 and 500 feet long. Sometimes the posts were as thick as 30 feet. One gate is intertwined with a kite.
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He added that he would have liked to have seen some suggestions from Dr. Kennedy as to what the gates may have been used for, if only to dissuade people from speculating as to extraterrestrial origins, as they have regarding the Sphinx and the Nazca Lines in Peru.
Still, the new findings tell of a time when the climate and ecology of Saudi Arabia was most likely much different from today, he said. Given the differences, “the mind of people in the past is not that easily read.”
