Desert "Sky"

SEARCHING FOR THE "WORKS OF THE OLD MEN"

Before I moved back to Newcastle, and started giving tours of Hadrian's Wall, my job was somewhat, different... This is a day in the life of an archaeologist doing rushed pre-construction survey work in the vast expanses of Saudi Arabia.

The "Works of the Old Men" are ancient (pre-Islamic) burial structures dotting the vast empty deserts that stretch from Syria all the way south to Yemen. Most are small circular "cairns". Others form strange shapes: "bullseyes" (seen here), "wheels", "rings", "triangles", "trumpets", "gates", "kites", and "pendants" (walls/lines) sometimes running for kilometers.

The enigmatic stone structures that dot the deserts and lava fields (harrat) of Arabia, Jordan, and Syria were first described to science by pilots in the 1920’s. They were called by the Bedouin, “The Works of the Old Men” (Maitland, 1927). The ease and availability of high quality satellite imagery, largely though Google Earth, has allowed international scholars and amateurs alike to study features that were once impossibly remote. Scholarly publication on the subject has greatly expanded (Brunner, 2015; Kemp & Malabeh, 2013; Kennedy, 2011; 2012; 2015; 2017), generating international publicity and public attention.

"LH0289" is one of the more spectacular "works" that I have seen. Its form is clear in satellite photos (see above): a bullseye cairn (30m across) with two pendants (100m long) made of individual triangles. At ground level, the design is challenging to understand and even harder to photograph. Here you can see the outer ring (background) and central cairn (right) with two ancillary cairns, off center, inside the circle (foreground, left). I visited during a rare event known as "spring", when unusually heavy autumn rains cause a bloom of vegetation in January. The otherwise barren desert is briefly transformed into beautiful savannah. The Bedouin herder (background, right) has lost a camel and hoped to spot it from this prominent ridge. (The top image was also taken during this "spring" event.)

Here's what I'm usually looking for: chambered burial cairns. Like most of them, the stones covering the center of this cairn have fallen in or been torn off by tomb robbers, possibly long long ago. These are pre-Islamic burials (usually) so they are at least 1,500 years old and could even be from the Bronze Age, 3,000+ years ago.

SURVEY IN TOUGH CONDITIONS - "KST1001" intact chambered cairn Each trip to the field was precious time, not to be wasted. That meant surveying in extreme heat (my record was 120F/49C) and punishing dust storms (I was forced indoors only once). I would often climb steep cliffs and jagged hills, chasing a shadow on the satellite imagery because, if I didn't find a cairn and measure its location right then, it might never be recorded. Obsessive? Yes. But fantastic? Absolutely.

What does the future hold for these remnants of the distant past? In addition to ubiquitous looting, I have seen many cairns destroyed by access roads, cellphone towers, military exercises, and just inexplicable bulldozing. But there is also hope. Saudi Arabia's heritage body (SCTH) has increasingly recognized the value and importance of pre-Islamic archaeology. I was fortunate to work for major developers who were conscientious of the natural and historical legacy of the land under their care. Development is coming. Only time will tell if it is a force for the destruction or preservation of an otherwise mute, remote, and mysterious past.