‘Gates’: a new archaeological site type in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The availability of high-resolution satellite imagery of Saudi Arabia on publicly available platforms such as Google Earth and Bing Maps has been transformational for archaeology. Within just a few years tens of thousands of sites previously unrecorded and scarcely known to the academic world have been mapped.Especially rich in sites are the successive lava fields (harret) stretching from southern Syria through Jordan and down the west coast of the Arabian Peninsula to Yemen, and characterised by the stone-built structures known to the Bedouin as the 'works of the old men'. Sites now being revealed include many types familiar from previous research in the wider region but also others of a form previously unknown. 'Gates' are one such type, found in large numbers in and around the Harret Khaybar in west-central Saudi Arabia. They are stone-built, the walls roughly made and low as with other 'works', but quite unlike them in form. Identification, mapping, and preliminary interpretation imply an early date in the sequence of the works-perhaps the very earliest-but no obvious explanation of their purpose can be discerned. Fieldwork is a desideratum. K E Y W O R D SArabia, gates, Harret Khaybar, kites, prehistory, remote sensing, works of the old men

Monumental landscapes of the Holocene humid period in Northern Arabia: The mustatil phenomenon

“…Little is known of larger, more complex, forms of stone structure. Of particular interest for earlier periods are forms known as desert kites and, as focussed on in this paper, mustatils which have previously been described as ‘gates’ ( Kennedy, 2017 ). Desert kites are generally seen as mass-kill hunting traps, and although common in northern Arabia, no detailed work has yet been conducted on them in the peninsula, so their chronology remains unclear ( Crassard et al, 2015 ; Kennedy et al, 2015 ).…”

“…In Arabia, desert kites and particularly mustatils have been argued to be the oldest forms of stone structure in the landscape, as they consistently underlie later forms of stone structure (e.g. Guagnin et al, 2020 ; Kennedy, 2017 ). However, the precise age of these older forms, their function, and origins are all currently unclear.…”

“…This has taken the form of mapping and analysis of the various sorts of stone structures which are abundant in northwest Arabia, as well as in the adjacent southern Levant (e.g. Abu-Azizeh et al, 2014 , 2015 ; Crassard et al, 2015 ; Kennedy, 2011 , 2017 ; Kennedy and Al-Saeed, 2009 ). Kennedy and Al-Saeed (2009) described one enigmatic form of stone structure that they called ‘gates’, due to their resemblance to farm gates when viewed from satellite imagery.…”

“…Based primarily on the analysis of satellite imagery, Kennedy (2017 : 156) gives the only previous detailed study of these structures, which he defined as ‘two short, thick lines of heaped stones, roughly parallel, linked by two or more much longer and thinner walls’. In the Harrat Khaybar area, they typically have two long walls, but sometimes three or even four parallel walls (hence the ‘gate’ like appearance).…”

“… Kennedy (2017) focussed on the Harrat Khaybar area, although noting that mustatils were also found further north and south of this area. In terms of their landscape positioning in Harrat Kaybar, mustatils are often located close to wadis (ephemeral river channels) flowing from the lava-field and claypans which would hold water after heavy rainfall ( Kennedy, 2017 ). This is not always the case, however, as the group on the flanks of a remote volcano (25.678048 N, 39.964294 E) noted by Kennedy demonstrates.…”