The “Works of the Old Men” in Arabia: remote sensing in interior Arabia

Applying Google Maps and Google Street View in criminological research

“…Areas that were previously considered too remote or too expensive to access in person can now be relatively easily surveyed from the researcher's computer (Myers 2010;Pringle 2010). For instance, the Google Maps satellite imagery database has been used to scan large parts of the Arabian peninsula for prehistoric ruins and structures (Kennedy 2011;Kempe and Al-Malabeh 2013), to obtain better estimates of fish catches in the Persian Gulf (Al-Abdulrazzak and Pauly 2013), and to estimate forestry biomass in India (Ploton et al 2011). Other studies have tapped into the Google Maps satellite imagery database to map the glacial geomorphology of the central Tibetan plateau (Morén et al 2011), and the English Lake District (Brown et al 2011).…”

Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating and spatial analysis of geometric lines in the Northern Arabian Desert

“…They are classified in four main categories based on their shape as seen from above (Kennedy, 2011;Kennedy et al, 2014) and correspond to "kites", "meandering walls", "wheels" and "pendants". Kites are extensive (i.e.…”

“…The wheels constitute circular stone arrangements with spokes radiating out of an approximate center. Their function is the subject of debate: although initially proposed to be a type of prehistoric settlement al-Malabeh, 2010, 2013), examination of variants on the basic style challenge that speculation in favor of funerary or ritual use (Kennedy, 2011), as suggested by sepulchral cairns that are enclosed by or encompass the wheels. Pendants (arrays of cairns) frequently intermingle among the other types of the "Works".…”

“…The established concept that the oldest kites date back to the 7th millennium BCE is the product of association with artifacts of familiar typology, or through correlation with adjacent structures where 14 C dating on archaeological remains was feasible (c.f. Betts, 1999;Helms and Betts, 1987;Kennedy, 2011). Recently, Zeder et al (2013) compiled published dates for different kites demonstrating that the kites of the region were being in use as late as the second millennium BCE.…”

“…Further, spatial statistics was employed to throw light on the topological aspects of the wheels, and specifically on their topological relations with the kites and local water resources, on their spatial arrangement (clustering), and finally on possible alignments encoded in their design. Such a question was posed for the bearings of the pendant tails (Kennedy and Bishop, 2011) and the alignments of a special type of wheel in Saudi Arabia (Kennedy, 2011). For this reason the sparse records from Wadi Wisad were combined with a larger dataset from the "Works" of the Azraq Oasis (Qa'a el-Azraq), which exhibits one of the densest systems of geometric lines in Harrat ash Shaam (Helms and Betts, 1987;Kennedy, 2011).…”