 |
| A "kite" structure seen from the air used in prehistory to trap game in the Arabian desert. |
Say a magic carpet and a genie's lamp, the stuff of Arabian Nights, which made the Arab desert famous for fables and legends?
Well, how about Google Earth instead? Like a friendly genie, that modern technology has started answering archeologist's wishes with its worldwide catalog of satellite views of the Earth. A pair of studies in the Journal of Archaelogical Science this year suggest these views are revealing a vast and ancient story, one only starting to emerge from the fabled desert of Arabia.
"(W)e are on the brink of an explosion of knowledge," writes archeologist David Kennedy of University of Western Australia in Perth, in a report in the current edition of the journal. Aerial photography and satellite images from Syria to Yemen are, "revealing hundreds of thousands of collapsed structures, often barely (19 to 30 inches) in height and virtually invisible at ground level," he writes.
Most often seen in the vast lava-rock fields called "harat" and the 251,000-square mile Rub'al Khali desert of Saudi Arabia, the structures take their names from their appearance from the air— "wheel" homes, "pendant"-shaped cairns, "keyhole" tombs and "kites" animal-pen traps. They are, Kennedy says, "opening up for re-interpretation the hugely inhospitable interior of Arabia which is proving to be the unexpected location of extensive human activity 2,000 (or more) years ago."
Who were the "Old Men of the Desert", as the Bedouin called the builders of these structures in 1927, when first asked about them by a Royal Air Force flight lieutenant named Maitland. Maitland published a report in a journal Antiquity, noting "hill fortresses" and other structures in the desert ear of the Dead Sea spotted on the air mail route from Cairo to Damascus.
"(T)hey certainly have the appearance of being of great antiquity," he noted at the end of his report on "The 'Works of the Old Men' in Arabia."
They actually do date from the Roman era, judging from inscriptions, all the way back to perhaps 7,000 B.C. based on flint tools found at others, Kennedy says, by e-mail. Monumental prehistoric structures cover the world from South America to Stonehenge, but the "Works" represent a "huge undertaking by prehistoric man that created an immense archaeological landscape in one of the most arid parts of the planet," he notes.
The best-known structures are the "kites," made with a diamond shape. They are animal pens with their open mouths placed at low points between hills, where gazelles, antelopes and other prey were driven by hunters. "Mass kills" of Persian gazelles in these pens likely led to the loss of the species from the region, suggested an April Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesreport led by archeologist Guy Bar-Oz of Israel's University of Haifa, looking at a mass gazelle gravesite, a kite in modern day Syria dating back to around 4,000 B.C.
The other structures are more mysterious. "Wheels overlie Kites but never vice-versa, therefore Wheels are probably younger than Kites," Kennedy says. Some walls just seem to meander purposely and random "gates," more than 100 spotted so far, appear to have no purpose at all. "There is no complete agreement on two key questions: 'When were they built?' and 'What for?'" he says about the structures.
Figuring that out will take archeologists on the ground, Kennedy suggests in a look at cairns, wheels and other structures seen at just one site in Jordan published earlier this year in the Journal of Archeological Science. "Aerial imagery can take research so far but is not an end - merely a means to an end. What is needed is more intensive and extensive field research," he says.
For now though, satellite images will have to do for inspecting places like Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, difficult for foreign researchers to investigate. "The number of high-resolution 'windows' onto the landscape of Saudi Arabia is still limited; most imagery is too poor for our purposes. We need the high-resolution coverage to be considerably extended," he says. An alternative, Bing Maps, has higher quality images, but less of them, he says.
Arthur Clarke, who famously called for the development of communication satellites in 1945, likely would be delighted by this latest advance in space-based archeology. "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible," he wrote, after all, in the same essay where he propounded his law of magic technology.
