Archaeologists in Saudi Arabia have unearthed eight ancient ‘standing stone circles’ that they believe were used as homes.
About 345 of these structures were identified through aerial surveys in the Harrat ‘Uwayrid, a lava field near the city of AlUla in northwestern Saudi Arabia, the team reported July 2 in the journal LevantThe circles vary in diameter from 4 to 8 meters and have at least one standing stone in the center.
The circles date back about 7,000 years and have the remains of stone walls and at least one doorway. They would have had roofs made of stone or organic materials, the team wrote.
During their excavations, the archaeologists discovered the remains of many basalt stone tools. Five of the standing circles alone yielded nearly 500 pounds (225 kilograms) of stone tools or debris, the team wrote. The archaeologists also found the remains of sheep, goat and cow bones.
Also among the finds were several shells, all of which came from the Red Sea, about 75 miles (120 kilometers) to the west. The presence of the shells “suggests the development of trade and exchange networks, concurrent with mobility,” the team wrote.
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The artifacts found in the circles, combined with the circles’ similarity to ancient houses excavated in Jordan, suggest that many, if not all, of the standing stone circles are also residential buildings, the team said.
Although people today sometimes associate stone circles with those of Steenhenge It is important to note that many early domestic structures were circular because they had a ritual purpose.
“Worldwide, early domestic architecture was always circular, and rectangular houses only appear in the later Neolithic,” Jane McMahonan honorary researcher at the University of Western Australia and lead author of the paper, told Live Science in an email.
Different landscape
About 7,000 years ago, the environment in northern Saudi Arabia was much wetter than today, but Agriculture was not yet in use. “There is no evidence of cultivation of domesticated plant species such as wheat and barley, but collection of wild plants probably occurred, and the landscape may have been manipulated to increase the likelihood and yield of wild species,” McMahon said.
While these standing stone circles were in use, another form of stone structure was also built, known today as a mustatil (Arabic for “rectangle”). Excavations at the mustatils suggest they had a ritual purpose that may have included cattle sacrifice. The concurrent use of the mustatils and standing stone circles indicates that it is “likely that these two megalithic structure types are aspects of a single cultural entity,” the team wrote.
Gary Rollefsonemeritus professor of anthropology at Whitman College and San Diego State University, who was not involved in the study but has done extensive archaeological work in the region, said he thinks the people who built the standing stone circles and mustatils are descended from people who lived in Jordan and Syria about 500 years earlier.
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He told Live Science that the architecture of the standing stone circles is similar to structures found in Jordan that date to about 500 years earlier, and that the people who built the structures in Jordan also herded sheep, goats and cattle. The migration may have been fueled by a population increase caused by new hunting technologies, such as the “kite”, a series of stone walls used to force wild animals into a killing areaThese advances in hunting dramatically increased the food supply, which in turn led to an increase in the human population in the Jordan/Syria area.
“They were building up a large population in eastern Jordan and (parts of) Syria,” Rollefson said, and they needed to find new hunting grounds. To do that, they had to gradually move south into present-day Saudi Arabia.
