400 mysterious stone structures, up to 7,000 years old, discovered in Saudi Arabia

400 mysterious stone structures, up to 7,000 years old, discovered in Saudi Arabia

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/400-mysterious-...ia-1643665

The so-called 'gates' are made of stone and resemble low walls. The largest of the structures is more than 500 meters long, while the smallest extends only about 10 meters. Many are located on the sides' volcanic domes, which once spewed out lava.

The structures are found in seemingly inhospitable lava fields that are also home to other human-made stone structures, which resemble kites and wheels.

The majority of the 'gates' were identified using satellite surveys, so no archaeological fieldwork has been conducted on site. However, an area of Harrat Khaybar home to some of the structures was mapped by volcanologists John Roobol and Vic Camp in the 1980s.


The lava domes that the gates are found on are no longer active, Camp told Live Science, although in the past lava covered some of the stone structures. He estimates that the oldest of the gates could have been constructed around 7,000 years ago.

The next step for the researchers is to conduct archaeological fieldwork to find out when exactly the gates were constructed and what their purpose was.

[Laird]

What are your thoughts on any sort of purpose to these structures, Sci?

As a primary school kid, I attended a mostly-boy's boarding school way out in the countryside for a year. We used to go out and build little dams and forts and stuff like that just for fun - they had no functional or other purpose. Could this be a similar impulse? Building cool structures out in the middle of nowhere just because it's fun? Or could it serve a more serious - perhaps symbolic, spiritual, or cultural - purpose?

Oh I have no idea, though if there really was some risk to creating them in such inhospitable places I suspect they weren't just made for fun?

I suspect there was some spiritual purpose, that or possibly some kind of environmental tracking? Perhaps an early warning system of some kind to test the danger of the lava flows?

I do wonder if there's some advantage to the existence of some of these structures in the subtle worlds rather than the material one but I admit that's just wild speculation on my part. :-)