Middle East 'Wheel' Patterns Echo Nazca Lines
The stone structures are visible from above using satellite mapping and aerial photography. The first ones were actually spotted in 1927 by a pilot, but now, using Google Earth, researchers can investigate their extent.
Led by archeologist David Kennedy from the University of Western Australia, a team of researchers focused on patterns in the Jeddah region of Saudi Arabia, and will detail their findings in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
"Sometimes when you're actually there on the site you can make out something of a pattern but not very easily," Kennedy told Live Science.
"Whereas if you go up just a hundred feet or so it, for me, comes sharply into focus what the shape is."
These so-called "wheels" appear in various designs, ranging from 82 to 230 feet across (25 to 70 meters). Shapes include kites (for funneling and killing animals), pendants (lines of stone cairns radiating from ancient burials), walls, and rectangles. Some of them have spokes inside.
They may be isolated or clustered in groups, and tend to be found in lava fields (harrat). Locally, they are known to the Bedouin tribesmen as the "works of the old men," and are believed to be at least 2,000 years old, making them older than the Nazca Lines.
"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," Kennedy told Live Science.
In Saudi Arabia, some of the circular wheels contain two spokes forming a bar that often aligns with the direction that the sun rises and sets. However, the spokes of wheels in Jordan and Syria do not appear to be astronomically aligned.
Before Google Earth, archeologists speculated the structures could be remains of houses or cemeteries.
In their paper, the researchers conclude that, "The Jeddah window has provided an opportunity to explore one area in far greater detail than ever previously possible."
"The stone-structures recorded in this window, though numerous, are still not the total picture," they write.
"It is obvious that the people who constructed so many wheels, pendants, cairns ... and, elsewhere, kites, gates, keyhole tombs and walls, will have had domestic sites as the everyday counterpart to the structures intended for economic, funerary or other purposes."
Physicist Amelia Sparavigna at Italy's Politecnico di Torino told Live Science via email that the stone circles could have been for worshipping places of ancestors, or for rituals connected with the seasons and astronomical events.
The paper can be read at http://bit.ly/rfzMKw
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