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| The area near the Azraq Oasis in Jordan has hundreds of wheels, large structures made of stone that date back at least 2,000 years. These wheel structures are often found on lava fields and range from25 meters to 70 meters across [Credit: David L. Kennedy APAAME_20080925_DLK-0308] |
Those are just some of the findings of new research on these Middle East lines, which were first encountered by pilots during World War I. RAF Flight Lt. Percy Maitland published an account of them in 1927 in the journal Antiquity, reporting that the Bedouin called the structures "works of the old men," a name still sometimes used by modern-day researchers.
The "works of the old men" include wheels, which often have spokes radiating out from the center, kites (stone structures used for funnelling and killing animals), pendants (lines of stone cairns) and meandering walls, which are mysterious structures that meander across the landscape for up to several hundred feet.
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| Another cluster of wheels found near the Azraq Oasis [Credit: David D. Boyer APAAME_20080925_DDB-0237] |
They "occur throughout the entire Arabia region, from Syria across Jordan and Saudi Arabia to Yemen," wrote the researchers. "The most startling thing about the 'Works' is that they are difficult to identify from the ground. This stands in contrast to their apparent visibility from the air."
New research on the Middle East lines was published recently in the Journal of Archaeological Science and the journal Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy. Live Science also got an advance copy of an article set to be published in the journal Antiquity.
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| Close-up photo of one of the wheels from the Azraq area [Credit: David D. Boyer APAAME_20080925_DDB-0257] |
Using a technique called optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), archaeologists dated two wheels at Wadi Wisad, in the Black Desert of Jordan. One wheel dated back 8,500 years, while the other wheel had a mix of dates that suggest it was built about 8,500 years and was remodeled or repaired around 5,500 years ago.
At the time these wheels were built, the climate in the Black Desert was more hospitable, and Wadi Wisad was inhabited. "Charcoal from deciduous oak and tamarisk [a shrub] were recovered from two hearths in one building dated to ca. 6,500 B.C.," wrote researchers in a forthcoming issue of Antiquity.
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| These stone structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with spokes radiating inside. This wheel in Jordan looks like it has four dots within its spokes [Credit: Robert H. Bewley APAAME_20090928_RHB-0120] |
"The majority of the spokes of the wheels in that cluster are oriented for some reason to stretch in a SE-NW direction," researchers wrote in the Journal of Archaeological Science. This points to "where the sun rises during the winter solstice."
Whether this alignment was intentional is unknown, researchers wrote in the journal article. "As for the rest of the wheels, they do not seem to contain any archaeoastronomical information."
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| This circular wheel looks kind of squeezed in this aerial photo. Researchers are still puzzled over what these stone circles were used for, with some suggesting perhaps they were places of worship or used for rituals connected with astronomical events [Credit: David L. Kennedy APAAME_20090917_DLK-0618] |
It's possible that different wheels may have served different uses, Rollefson said. In the case of the two dated wheels, "the presence of cairns suggests some association with burials, since that is often the way of treating people once they died." Rollefson is careful to point out that "there are other wheels where cairns are entirely lacking, pointing to a different possible use."
Rollefson is co-director of the Eastern Badia Archaeological Project. His team is hoping to excavate a few of the cairns, which are located within the wheels, in the next few years.
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| The wheels in this picture are very amorphous, their spokes looking like bubbles [Credit: David L. Kennedy APAAME_20090928_DLK-0660] |
Though the wheels are often difficult to make out on the ground, they are not invisible. "Granted, one can't see the finished product standing at ground level, but one can still determine a general geometric configuration," Rollefson told Live Science.
He said that to create the more precisely designed wheels, people might have used a long rope and stake.
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| Cairns, or piles of stones, are often found associated with the wheels, sometimes circling the perimeter and other times in among the spokes. Here, the wheel to the south has a ring of such cairns around it [Credit: Robert H. Bewley APAAME_20090928_RHB-0092] |
They've been investigating wheels, and other "works of the old men," by using free satellite imagery that is available through Google Earth and Bing. They are also using historical aerial images taken of Saudi Arabia and Yemen during the 20th century.
The circles tend to be small and have only one or two bars instead of spokes, said David Kennedy, of the University of Western Australia, who co-directs the project. Some of the "wheels" are actually shaped like squares, rectangles or triangles, he said.
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| The spokes of this wheel radiate from a central hub [Credit: David L. Kennedy APAAME_20091008_DLK-0205] |
At present, the archaeologists are not able to conduct fieldwork or aerial imaging (using planes or helicopters) in Saudi Arabia or Yemen.
Another form of "works of the old men," which Kennedy and his team have found in Saudi Arabia, is of structures that he calls "gates."
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| The Harrat ash-Sham lava field stretches from Syria to Saudi Arabia and contains thousands of wheels. Here, drawings reveal the various shapes these structures can take [Credit: Stafford Smith] |
Scientists don't know how far back the gates date, nor their purpose. "I coined the term 'gate' for no better reason than that I needed a convenient label to describe them and they reminded me of the sort of field gates I saw all around in my rural childhood in Scotland," said Kennedy.
The researchers found that gates tend not to be located near kites (which were used for hunting). Indeed, some of the gates were built in places, such as barren volcanic slopes, which were unlikely to support large animal herds. Archaeologists found "five [gates] on the outer slopes of the bowl of one of the volcanoes [called Jabal al-Abyad]" in Saudi Arabia, they wrote in the Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy journal article.
Kennedy said that his team is finishing up its research on the gates and will be publishing another journal article in the future describing the team's findings in greater detail.
Author: Owen Jarus | Source: Live Science [December 07, 2015]