Inscribed landscapes in the Black Desert: Petroglyphs and kites at Wisad Pools, Jordan

Abstract

Petroglyphs are well known in the Negev, eastern and southern Jordan, and the Arabian Peninsula. Intensive documentation of hundreds of petroglyphs at the site of Wisad Pools in the Black Desert of eastern Jordan records animals, humans, hunting traps and geometric designs, connecting people and places to the larger landscape. These were recorded at the landscape scale with drones and photogrammetry, and the local scale through the construction of a database combined with GPS recording and terrestrial photogrammetry. Petroglyphs of animals and hunting traps are significant because the site is located within a landscape that includes enormous and enigmatic hunting traps (desert kites). Mapping these depictions highlights typological distribution, association of types, and relation to landscape features as well as the topography of the basalt boulders on which they were pecked. The depictions of animals and hunting traps provide clues about the use of desert kites, the social role of hunting, communal gatherings, and feasting in the region.

The Black Desert Drone Survey: New Perspectives on an Ancient Landscape

“…The survey described here builds upon earlier tests of drone mapping in the region with the Eastern Badia Archaeological Project. In 2012 and 2013, fixed-wing and rotary-wing drones captured high-resolution imagery around the main habitation sites at Wisad Pools as part of a survey to map the distribution of petroglyphs [41]. This confirmed the feasibility of attempting a larger drone survey in this austere environment.…”

“…The database also tracks the presence of desert kites. Kites are, of course, present throughout the region and are increasingly well-mapped using satellite and historical imagery [34,41,63]. However, the kites in the survey region overlooked in some of the satellitemapping studies [35], are located well away from the well-documented kite "chains" in the heart of the harra.…”

“…We began using UAVs in 2012, though initially budget and technological constraints limited the area that could be surveyed as it was only feasible to fly a manually piloted fixed-wing drone. Subsequent years allowed the adoption of onboard flight control computers capable of autonomous, preplanned mapping missions (as above) and the beginning of multirotor flights that take advantage of the convenience of vertical take-off and landing, and hovering [41,45].…”

Kites of AlUla County and the Ḥarrat ʿUwayriḍ, Saudi Arabia

“…107–108, p. 111; Abu‐Azizeh et al, 2021; Barge et al, 2016, p. 107, 108; Crassard et al, 2022, pp. 11–23; Hill et al, 2020, p. 253; note Nadel et al, 2015's ‘shallow cells’), are in fact better described as walled pits, in that they have an excavated component lined by a constructed wall that extends above ground level. It is this part of the kite that provides the trap (Crassard et al, 2022).…”

Following the herds? A new distribution of hunting kites in Southwest Asia

“…This perception of the kite as a form of monumentality, through the exaggeration of scale and form as an expression of status, identity and territoriality, provides one model for understanding the apparent development of increasingly complex kite forms, and why this would have had no clear improvement in hunting capabilities (Betts and Burke, 2021). The monumentality of kites also complements a wider recognition of their place within the symbolic and ritual spheres of Neolithic peoples in the region, as demonstrated by their appearance in rock art (Hill et al, 2020), and associated with carved human figures and a deposit of marine fossils at Jibal Al-Khashabiyeh in the south-east Badia (Abu-Azizeh and Tarawneh, 2022). Kites clearly formed a central role in terms of identity among social groups in the region.…”