A team of Jordanian and French archaeologists claims to have discovered a roughly 9,000-year-old shrine in Jordan’s eastern desert.
The ritual complex was discovered beside enormous structures known as “desert kites,” or mass traps, that are thought to have been used to gather wild gazelles for killing in a Neolithic campground.
These traps are made up of two or more long stone walls that converge into an enclosure and can be found all throughout the Middle East’s deserts.
“The site is unusual, first and foremost because of its degree of preservation,” said Jordanian archaeologist Wael Abu-Azziza, the project’s co-director. “It’s 9,000 years old, and it’s practically complete.”
Two carved standing stones with anthropomorphic figures, one with a representation of the “desert kite,” as well as an altar, hearth, marine shells, and a tiny replica of the gazelle trap, were found within the shrine.
The shrine “sheds an entirely new light on the symbolism, creative expression, and spiritual culture of these hitherto unknown Neolithic communities,” the researchers said in a statement on Tuesday.
The residents’ proximity to the traps suggests they were specialized hunters, and the traps were “the centre of their cultural, economic, and even symbolic life in this marginal zone,” according to the statement.
Archaeologists from Jordan’s Al Hussein Bin Talal University and the French Institute of the Near East were part of the team. During the most recent digging season in 2021, the site was excavated.
