Nearly 400 mysterious stone structures thought to have been created by man over 2,000 years ago have been identified in the Saudi desert by an Australian researcher using Google Earth.
Undated photo provided by University of Western Australia showing mysterious stone structures in the Saudi desert.
David Kennedy, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia who leads teams of researchers who have surveyed thousands of archaeological sites in the Middle East, said on Wednesday October 25, 2017 he was unable to explain the significance of these stone formations. , the oldest of which are 9,000 years old. "You can't see them intelligibly at ground level, but if you look up several dozen meters, or higher thanks to a satellite, they appear in all their beauty ", he said in a press release. Despite 40 years of research in the region, the researcher explained that he was overwhelmed when he spotted for the first time on satellite images the structures in the lava fields of an ancient volcano.
"I called them 'barriers' because when you look at them from above they look like flat field fences, with two straight posts on each side connected by one or more long lines ", he said. "They don't look like structures that people would have lived in, nor animal traps or structures for disposing of corpses. Their function is a mystery. "
Undated photo provided by University of Western Australia showing mysterious stone structures in the Saudi desert-THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA/AFP/GRANT SCROGGIE.
These findings will be detailed in November in an article published in the journal Arabian Archeology and Epigraphy . These structures were initially spotted in 2004 by Saudi Arabian Abdullah Al-Saïd, a neurologist and amateur archaeologist who had spotted stone walls in the field, before identifying certain entire structures in 2008 using Google Earth and contacting Mr. Kennedy. "He said to me:- I am interested in the heritage of my country and I saw on Google Earth some strange structures in the lava fields “, told Mr. Kennedy to the ABC chain. Specialist in aerial archeology, the Australian researcher and his team have photographed since 1997 tens of thousands of stone structures, mainly in Jordan, some of which were used as hunting traps.