BSS :
Archaeologists deep in the Jordanian desert have discovered a 9,000-year-old ritualistic complex near what is thought to be the earliest known large human-built structure worldwide.Gazelle hunters used the Stone Age shrine site, excavated last year, and features carved stone figures, an altar and a miniature model of a large-scale hunting trap.
The giant game traps the model represents-so-called “desert kites”-were made of long walls that converge to corral running gazelles into enclosures or holes for slaughter.
Similar structures of two or more stonewalls, some several kilometres (miles) long, have been found in deserts across Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey and Kazakhstan.
The Neolithic-era ritual site was discovered inside a larger campsite last October by a joint French-Jordanian team called the South Eastern Badia Archaeological Project.
The nearby desert kites in Jibal al-Khashabiyeh are “the earliest large-scale human built structures worldwide known to date,” said a statement by the SEBA Project.
It hailed the “spectacular and unprecedented discovery” of the ritualistic site, believed to date to about 7000 BC.
It featured two steles with anthropomorphic features, the taller one 1.12 metres high, other artefacts including animal figurines, flints, and some 150 arranged marine fossils. The wider, decade-old research project aims to study “the first pastoral nomadic societies, as well as the evolution of specialised subsistence strategies”.
