Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Laotian Jars, Oldest African Human Burial, and Saudi Arabian Stone Rectangles - TAS 122
208 Plays4 years ago
This week we discuss three interesting archaeology stories in the news. First, new dating techniques are used to date Laos' field of jars. Then, we discuss the oldest known homo sapien burial found in Africa. Finally, excavations of mustatils in Saudi Arabia shed some light on what these structures were used for.
Links
- Archaeologists finally uncovered some of the mystery behind Laos’s Plain of Jars
- Dating the megalithic culture of laos: Radiocarbon, optically stimulated luminescence and U/Pb zircon results
- Africa's Oldest Human Burial Site
- These mysterious stone structures in Saudi Arabia are older than the pyramids
- The mustatils: cult and monumentality in Neolithic north-western Arabia
Contact
- Chris Webster
- chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
Please Visit Our Sponsors!
- Archaeology Southwest Cafe: https://www.archaeologysouthwest.org/things-to-do/cafe/
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to The Archaeology Show
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to The Archaeology Show. TAS goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us. Welcome to the podcast.
Episode Overview: Megaliths and Burials
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Archaeology Show, Episode 122. On today's show, we talk about the plane of jars, an African child burial, and Arabian mustotils. Let's dig a little deeper.
00:00:34
Speaker
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show. This week, we've got a few news articles for you, as we mentioned in the introduction. Rachel, how's it going? It's going good. I'm excited about these articles. I found some really cool ones this week. I'm excited that it's not pouring down rain on the top of our RV like it has been the last couple days. Yes, that's nice, too. It's actually sunny out today for the first time in a long time, so after we're done recording, we need to get our butts outside.
00:00:56
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Plane of Jars: A Megalithic Mystery
00:00:58
Speaker
So all right, so let's bring up this first article. It's about jars in Laos. Yes. I mean, these have been, you may even have seen a screensaver about these things. I mean, the pictures of these jars in a field have been around for a really long time. It's not like they're any new thing, but they were recently
00:01:18
Speaker
under some additional scrutiny and analysis and that's what we're going to talk about today. There's an article in PLOS ONE which stands for Public Library of Science and it's really just like open source journals that people are publishing and they're pretty great. Yeah we first found this article because it was in like
00:01:34
Speaker
popular science, I think, or something like that. And fortunately, and always, always do this when you're reading news articles, like on your news app in the morning or however you get your news, always do this. They mentioned that there was an article in a journal that they had found this information in.
00:01:52
Speaker
And I had to go track that journal down because these people don't like to link to those journals sometimes. But it wasn't that hard. And I was able to find the source material because it's very interesting to read the article from the media source, in this case, Popular Science. And the title of that article is, Archaeologists Finally Uncovered Some of the Mystery Behind Laos' Plane of Jars. That's the article.
00:02:14
Speaker
And then I was pretty easily able to find the journal that this is related to. So anyway, that's just your hot tip about how to do science in the media these days is find the original journal. And I think the hallmark of a well-written, popular article, because these guys, they troll the journals. They know when stuff comes out. Because these journals, some of them are still periodical, like Nature and others like that. But a lot of them do have articles that they just release on their website.
00:02:44
Speaker
And not necessarily articles, but maybe like editorials and reviews and sometimes just full on research articles. So these people watch them and a hallmark of a good one is one that actually cites back to the original article. So always look for that. And I totally have to eat my words a little bit. They definitely linked to the journal in the article. There's another one we're going to talk about later on where they didn't link to it. I had to go hunt it down, but this one they did link to it.
00:03:12
Speaker
Most of them don't, I've noticed. Yeah, it's like they don't want to link away from their website. I learned that when I was working for a large online company, that they never want to link you away from their website. Well, the actual research article we'll put in the show notes, but it's called Dating the Megalithic Culture of Laos.
00:03:28
Speaker
which is lowercase, which is weird. That must be a typo. Radiocarbon, optically stimulated luminescence, and U slash PB zircon results, which is probably some sort of uranium-led dating techniques. Optically stimulated luminescence is OSL, as it's commonly referred to, but we'll talk about all that in a minute.
00:03:48
Speaker
Yeah, so like let's go to the beginning here because I had heard of these but I didn't really know a whole lot about them. But the last plane of jars is a sort of like a 30 square mile area that is strewn with thousands of these jars. And I will admit that a lot of places make it seem like it's just like you walk across this boundary and it's just like jars for miles and miles. But what it actually is is like clusters of them.
00:04:10
Speaker
that are kind of grouped together throughout this 30 square mile area and a lot of them are clustered in large groups like maybe hundreds of them but then there's also like some singles and some smaller numbers and each one is its own site. So kind of think of it as clusters of them in this 30 square mile area not like one giant field of them. And what were these jars used
Purpose and Dating of the Jars
00:04:32
Speaker
for?
00:04:32
Speaker
Well, they don't know. They're made of stone. So I had seen pictures of these and not really comprehended what that means, but they are made of stone. They are carved out of stone. They are megalithic, giant, three to 10 feet high jars that are carved out of stone. They can weigh up to 14 tons. So they're huge.
00:04:53
Speaker
Well, weren't a lot of them used as burials though? No. Okay. There's no evidence of burials inside the jars. Inside the jars. Yeah. Not, not that I had seen in reading this article and a couple others that I came across. But associated with some other burials in this article, they do have like little jars with caps on them. Exactly. Yeah. So the interesting thing is this, these excavations that they've been doing have been sort of around the jars, the stone jars and under the jars and basically just trying to get the context
00:05:20
Speaker
for what the jars were for out of the surrounding ground and excavations, right? And they found a lot of burials there. And some of those burials were in ceramic jars, similar in shape, though not size, their normal jar size for a human burial. They found those excavating there. So it does seem like they are
00:05:42
Speaker
related to that and that this whole megalithic stone jar thing is some kind of ritual burial area. But, and I think they just need more research here. I think the one big thing that I took away from this is that they were able to date the soil right below the jars that are still in C2.
00:06:05
Speaker
And they think that they could have been placed there up to 3,000 years ago, right? Yeah. However, the analysis of the human remains and the artifacts found with the human remains have only been dated to like seven or 800 years ago. So there's a disparity in those two dates.
00:06:24
Speaker
And it makes you wonder if they were in constant use for 3,000 years. And the samples that they took to get the 700 or 800 years from the human burials are just a sample. And there are others there that are older that they haven't encountered yet. Or maybe they were already there. And then people 2,000 years later started using them for burials. I don't know. There's a lot of speculation that you can go into with that. And there's still a lot of mystery, I think.
00:06:51
Speaker
makes you wonder, too, I mean, these jars are just out and on the surface, and if there's, you know, burials nearby, burials associated with the jars but not inside the jars, you know, were they looted? Were they, you know, were they disturbed in some other way? And were they used for some other purpose 3,000 years ago when these things were placed? Because that's a big question.
00:07:14
Speaker
article was trying to answer was when were these stone drawers placed? Because you can't really date the stone. Well, you can date the stone, but it's going to say it's three billion years old. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Oh, and they did seem to find the quarry related to where the stones came from, but that still doesn't really give you date so much.
00:07:30
Speaker
Well, it does kind of, because they took zircon. It's in the stone, yeah. And you can tell, it has to do with exposure rates to the environment, right? So when you have the original source material and you kind of dig in and you find out, okay, this is the, I don't know if they're doing amounts or what they're doing, but it's basically comparing ratios from the undisturbed source material with the disturbed
00:07:53
Speaker
material in the jars and then measuring the difference between the two. And then you can tell a rough amount of time of when the material was actually quarried and excavated. Oh, what cool science. That is so neat. I didn't even know that was possible.
00:08:08
Speaker
Yeah, it's pretty neat. The OSL, optically stimulated luminescence, is used in dating, but also I thought it was used for source material configuration. You point it at something and you find out what's the composition of something. I might be messing that up with something else, though.
00:08:25
Speaker
I don't know a lot about dating, so I can't confirm or ... Either way, they tested the material underneath the jars, because when these jars were placed, so to speak, the ground underneath them hasn't seen daylight since that happened, and that affects the ground. It has a massive impact on the ground.
00:08:46
Speaker
so to speak. But using those two techniques with the Zircon and the OSL and some of the other stuff they did, they were able to come up with some timeframes, which is pretty cool.
00:08:59
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's really neat and I'm just very intrigued about the whole area and how it was used by people because very clearly people were using this area. I don't think there was much evidence of like domestic occupation or domestic use. It really was all burial related or ritual related potentially and it just, it kind of makes me think about like modern day people, right? Let's say you're in,
00:09:28
Speaker
Greece somewhere and there's a temple there that's 2,000 years old. People today love to go there and check it out and are just interested in it, right? And I feel like a thousand years ago, people would do the same thing to something that was from a previous generation or a group of people too. So like it's entirely possible that those jars were put there 3,000 years ago.
00:09:53
Speaker
And then a later group of people were like, whoa, those are really cool. We're going to incorporate that into our current beliefs and ideas and rituals. And they used it for a different purpose than they were originally put there. I guess that's what I'm getting at here. Yeah, which is fairly common when you have something on the landscape for so long. People knew about it forever. Like I said, these weren't hidden. These weren't just recently discovered. They've been around for a long time. Yeah, and they just kind of incorporate it into their current life.
00:10:21
Speaker
Yeah, I'm rereading some paragraphs here on the OSL stuff, too. And it was specifically used for the dating. So that was right. And they took the sediment samples from underneath the jars, like we mentioned, and the last time they were exposed to light,
00:10:37
Speaker
was when the jars were not there. You know, they placed the jars on top of them, and then they weren't exposed to light. And that's how they use the OSL dating to basically measure that. It's incredibly complex, right? They can basically do it with a machine, though, and drop this thing in there, and it's pretty cool how they do that.
00:10:56
Speaker
Do they have to like fully move the stone jar out of the way? Or can they like kind of tunnel underneath basically? Yeah. It says they were collected by horizontally hammering 20 centimeter lengths of 35 millimeter diameter opaque plastic tubing directly into the sediment. So they basically course-ampled it. They poured it like, but in a horizontal direction rather than a vertical direction. That's cool. So they dug down next to it and then hammered it in. Cause I would imagine that sediment with some of those really heavy jars was really compact.
00:11:25
Speaker
I would imagine. And they wanted the sediment that was directly beneath the jar because you don't want sediment that's like even a centimeter below the jar because that's not the stuff that was exposed to light. Yeah. You know, that's that's not the stuff that was that's always been dark. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So the other thing I wonder about and I didn't I don't remember reading it in this article. Maybe you do. But have they done any testing on the residue on the inside of the jars at all?
00:11:53
Speaker
Or can they? Are they too exposed to the elements maybe? I don't know if the focus of this was residue analysis on the jars to see what was inside there, but they did do radiocarbon dating on some of the remains. So I know that, but that doesn't answer your question. That was just one of the other things that they did. So the three things was the zircon analysis.
00:12:12
Speaker
the OSL and then the radiocarbon dating, because dating was the focus of this article. Use was not necessarily the focus of this research. That might be another article. That's the thing with articles, too. You're wondering, when you're reading this, why didn't they do this? Why didn't they do that? They probably had a field season where they did lots of stuff, but when you write a paper,
00:12:35
Speaker
your paper has a thesis. What question are you trying to answer with your paper? What methods did you try to use to discover what that answer was? And what were your conclusions? So you don't put 17 things in a paper. You put one thing in a paper. And their question was, how old are these jars? This is what they came up with. So while they may have collected the data to answer other questions, those are going to be in other papers. All right. Well, pretty cool.
00:13:00
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's really neat and it makes me want to put Laos on my list of places to go. I want to do, oh my God, this is what we're going to do. It's a pretty lousy place to go. You're the worst. No, it's a UNESCO heritage site now. It was just added like two years ago, I think. So I think our like bucket list goal should be to go to all of the UNESCO heritage sites. It wouldn't take too long, I'm sure. Yeah, it's only like six of them, right? Yeah, it wouldn't be too bad.
00:13:29
Speaker
Yeah, it'll be awesome. Let's do it. All right, so let's go from Laos to Africa and talk about some really old buried dead children.
Discovery of Ancient African Child Burial
00:13:39
Speaker
We'll be back in a minute. Welcome back to The Archaeology Show, episode 122. And we are now moving to Africa. And as somebody who runs the Archaeology Podcast Network, somehow I get on mailing lists as a media person. And I actually heard about this.
00:13:57
Speaker
pre-release when they sent it to me a few days ago. And then I think it was May 5th when the, that was yesterday as we're recording this, so May 5th when the embargo was lifted and people were able to post about it. And they did, like a lot of people posted about it. So now we're going to talk about it, but it's basically, it's called Africa's oldest human burial site. And I know one of the articles we're linking to is through National Geographic, but I mean, the basics of this, let's just talk about it. First off, it was found in Kenya, the coast of Kenya, I believe it was.
00:14:25
Speaker
Yeah, pretty close to the coast, like 10 miles-ish. The other thing is, this was found, if I'm remembering from the article correctly, like four or five years ago. Yeah. And there was almost nothing left. It was all, I mean, it was fairly decomposed. I mean, there was just not a lot to find.
00:14:40
Speaker
It was just very fragile. They were able to separate the bone from the material it's in, but it took a lot of intensive lab work, I believe. Well, they cast it all in the field. The plaster casted the whole thing and just took it all to the lab. And it's just taken forever to get this thing basically lab excavated out of the plaster to figure out what they have. But they had a tooth and they had some other stuff. They knew it was human, for sure. Oh, yeah, it's definitely human. Yeah. But the thing is, what makes this special, I mean, there's literally billions of people buried in Africa, right?
00:15:10
Speaker
But what makes this special is we don't have a lot of great examples of humans being human, for lack of a better way to say that, that go back this old. And what I mean by that is, I mean, the human Homo sapiens dates back, depending on where you look, as much as 200,000 years.
00:15:29
Speaker
But, you know, usually around 200,000 years ago, they were still basically extremely primitive in their culture, in their thinking and how they acted. And, you know, very much tribal hunter gatherers, you know, just a little more than animals, to be honest. I don't think like death rituals really played a huge role in that, like a hunter gatherer, like we need food to survive kind of an environment. Right. Right. So there's not a lot of burials, basically.
00:15:55
Speaker
No, not a lot of intentional burials. But this child was clearly buried, and it looks like they were saying like a pillow, but it looks like probably leaves and sticks and things were placed under her head. Yeah, they made some kind of thing that propped her head up. To support it. Yeah, and because as decomposition happened, the head sort of fell down, and they can see that. Yeah, it's interesting to me that they can tell that it was propped up.
00:16:22
Speaker
And I'm wondering how they can tell that because it might have to do with when the body, when you die, if they didn't bury her right away or if they buried her right away or whatever, the body goes into rigor mortis. And I wonder if the something happens to the bones when it goes into rigor because then after you decompose, I mean, probably hundreds of years went by at least before she decomposed and the material under her decomposed.
00:16:46
Speaker
The material under her head probably decomposed way quicker because she wasn't buried in a coffin. She was buried in the dirt. Like in a pit, yeah. So when that stuff decomposed, it's interesting to me how they can even tell that. I'm not 100% sure how that works. I think it's because of the angle that they found the head or the skull bones at. But couldn't they have just laid her that way at that angle? It's entirely possible. They definitely say that it's possible that that's what happened. They're not saying for sure that she was on a pillow.
00:17:15
Speaker
But the big thing here is she was wrapped in a shroud, it seems, and her head was nestled on a pillow. Those are the two big key components here, which tells me, man, if this was happening 78,000 years ago, it's not like that was the, somebody just said, this is gonna be the first one, let's do it this way, because this is our baby child here, and we're really sad now. It was probably something that was happening. And it's just like when,
00:17:44
Speaker
When did that start? It's interesting to see because not to relate humans to other animals, but let's relate humans to other animals. Even take a dog, for example. If a dog has a litter of puppies and one of those puppies dies, anybody who's ever been a dog owner knows that the dog is visibly sad. Visibly sad that the puppy is dead. They get over it pretty quick because they had 14 of them.
00:18:07
Speaker
they're visibly sad. To use an example of a dog again, because they're such good human companions, if you have two dogs and one of them dies, or two cats or something like that, the other animal is visibly upset by it. So if you go back to
00:18:23
Speaker
ape-like species and humans, early humans, they would have been visibly sad if a member of their family died. Just because they're primitive and running around half naked doesn't mean that they're not going to be sad. But when did they decide to protect and bury their dead? Because covering somebody in a shroud symbolically and then putting them underground says, I don't want you to be eaten by animals.
00:18:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think from what I was reading, there's some speculation because the other early graves that have been found in Africa, this one dates to 78,000 years ago, but there's been some others that were in the like 69,000 years ago, 74,000 years ago, like in that timeframe, so equally old. They are also of children and there is a little bit of speculation that
00:19:06
Speaker
These sort of primitive populations recognize that the life of a child was cut short and that is like lost potential and all of that not that they like physically thought of it that way but that was You know, you can see that with a child and and therefore they took more care with their burial whereas
00:19:28
Speaker
an older person passing away, an adult, like that was sort of considered part of life and it was more natural and there might not have been as much ceremony around it. I mean living in that environment, I would have bet very few people died from what we today would call natural causes, but back then they were probably would have been called getting mauled by a lion, a natural cause. That was probably like life on the
00:19:54
Speaker
Oh, Jaguar Paul got mauled, so I guess we'll move on. That's how you get the name Jaguar Paul. You survived that once, right?
00:20:09
Speaker
I think that it does say a lot about humans and man this really leads me into another discussion of humanity and how disappointed I am in us because if we're burying people 78,000 years ago we're always finding stuff that that we did as humans that are just impressive you know tens of thousands of years ago I'm like why did it take so long to invent space travel
00:20:30
Speaker
Why do I not have a hoverboard right now, and why am I not living on another planet? Yeah, physics. That's hard. Physics is hard. Physics is hard, but look how much we figured out in the last 500 years. Look how much we figured out. We came up with all the equations, we used them, we built rockets, and we've been to the moon, and now we've been to Mars. Well, our robots have. So, it just makes me wonder, man, the actual pace of things is so mind-numbingly slow in prehistory. It is, and it might be the
00:21:00
Speaker
small number of humans that were around, so more people means more innovation and playing off of each other, whereas here they're in small bands and it just slows things down when there's less interaction. Well, everything goes back to agriculture. Yeah, that too. And it makes you wonder too, why it took so long to develop something like agriculture, right? Because agriculture allowed us to become more sedentary, which allowed some people to
00:21:27
Speaker
have idle time to do things and not think of just survival for once. And when you have the ability to not think of just survival for once, you have the ability to think about other stuff. And that's when things happen.
00:21:41
Speaker
Anyway, this is a really interesting article and it does say a lot about early humans in Africa and what they were doing and what they were thinking. Oh, and also like go look at this article just to see where the cave is because if I got to go to work every day with that cave as my surrounding, I would be a very happy human because it just looks spectacular.
00:22:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's pretty crazy. I've been to Kenya, but only to Nairobi to drive to Tanzania. I never went out to the coast. I was going to say that's more like desert-y type of a situation. It's pretty desert-y. Yeah. But this, the cave is just amazing. And I think that also speaks to the intention behind the burial because it's such a beautiful spot. Maybe it was chosen in part because of the beauty as a resting place for a treasured tiny human.
00:22:31
Speaker
Yeah, well in later societies too, across the planet, buried their dead inside their homes. They buried them in the floor inside their homes. And a cave like this, I mean there's a whole cave system here, so it's not like caves weren't short supply. But I wonder if, well, A, I wonder
00:22:52
Speaker
If the family did live here for a little while and just buried her there and then the family moved on or whatever, nobody inherited the cave. Or if they're gonna find other burials.
00:23:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's possible. Was it like a burial area? That would be a whole new thing right there, is having a cemetery, for lack of a better way to say that. Oh, they'd have to completely rethink, because right now they're thinking that burial was just for members of the group that, in their minds, deserved it. It wasn't a normal aspect of life to die this young.
00:23:28
Speaker
Which is, again, odd, isn't it? It's not that easy to keep a child alive now. They're always getting into stuff. That's true. Yeah, it does make you wonder, because infant mortality and stuff is definitely a thing. When you look at some of the people alive today, that certain religions don't really believe in birth control, and they just keep pumping out kids. They may have 7-10 kids today, families.
00:23:52
Speaker
Back then, I would imagine that you had a lot of kids and a lot of them died, which surprises me. Maybe, but I think it was because the only way to feed a baby was with your boob.
00:24:09
Speaker
And you only got two of them, I guess. Well, yeah, but your body won't allow you to, most of the time, if everything's biologically working properly, your body doesn't allow you to get pregnant again until the last child has been weaned. For the most part, that's accurate. Now there's weird things that can happen, obviously. So you would probably have a solid two, maybe even three years between pregnancies, which is actually kind of a long time.
00:24:35
Speaker
Maybe. I don't know. My mom didn't. 18 months. Your mom was probably not breastfeeding you. That's probably true. I didn't even think about that. If you stop breastfeeding, your body will figure it out and get pregnant again. I never really thought about that. Do you know anything about women's health? Not really, no.
00:24:54
Speaker
But prehistoric women, also I know literally nothing. Yeah, well, most of us know literally nothing about them. So I'm just speculating based on what I know about the modern woman. Sadly, I know nothing about the modern woman. Clearly, we have no children. I don't know how it works. All right. So on that note,
Mustotils: Saudi Arabia's Ancient Structures
00:25:18
Speaker
On the Chris Knows Nothing About Women note, we're gonna move over to the Arabian Desert, Saudi Arabia, and talk about some must-a-tills back in a minute. Welcome back to segment three of episode 122 of The Archaeology Show. So this segment, we are moving across the world a little ways here to the Arabian Desert in Saudi Arabia.
00:25:43
Speaker
And the thing that we're looking at is based on an article that came out in antiquity. And it's about these mysterious stone structures in Saudi Arabia that are older than the pyramids. That's how it was put in the NBC article that I found about it. Things in our world are either older or younger than the pyramids and relative the size of a football field.
00:26:04
Speaker
It's like, it's like the one thing that people can visualize so they always, you know, relate it to that. Yeah. But these are really, really cool structures. They, they do consider them monumental architecture and they're called mustotils.
00:26:20
Speaker
And what's going on there is they are basically these long rectangular structures made of stone and they are dotted all over the northwestern desert in Saudi Arabia.
00:26:35
Speaker
So before we get too far, I want to talk about, like we did in the last segment, or one of the last segments, about what the article's really talking about. Because the actual article, and you can find it at Cambridge University Press, they're the clearinghouse for American antiquity. And the article is titled, now this is a peer-reviewed article that was published online, actually wasn't published in American antiquity, it was published online. It's an open access one, yeah. So you can read the whole thing. Exactly, which is pretty cool. So we'll have the link in the show notes. Yeah, for sure.
00:27:03
Speaker
But the actual title is called The Mustatils, Cult and Monumentality in Neolithic Northwestern Arabia. So they're not really talking about anything else. The title kind of speaks to their thesis statement. They're talking about cult and monumentality, so a little bit of religion and a little bit of big stuff is what that means, related to the Mustatils in the Neolithic time period of Northwestern Arabia. So I'd just like to say that because
00:27:28
Speaker
You see the article headlines, and they'll usually pull something out that they pulled from the thing, but these guys are not going to be all wide-ranging and talking about 10,000 things. They're going to talk about one thing.
00:27:44
Speaker
Astounding or mysterious or whatever, you know, so in this case then the article that I originally saw was by NBC and they titled their article these mysterious stone structures in Saudi Arabia are older than the pyramids which Of course, there's your pyramid reference like we were talking about and then mysterious and they are kind of mysterious but like I don't think there is mysterious as NBC wanted you to Believe that they are
00:28:08
Speaker
So there's charcoal dates for these that date them back to about 5,000 BCE. So they have a pretty good date on some of them, not all of them, but some of them. They're really long. Like I said, rectangular structures, they can be 20 to 620 meters in length. And what is going on there is there's these long, kind of low-ish stone walls.
00:28:31
Speaker
And they're parallel stone walls, right? And then on either end, they're capped by a much shorter length of wall. So they're very long, skinny rectangles. And one end of it is usually more of a platform than a wall. So there's a larger structure that's all filled in with stone.
00:28:51
Speaker
And then at the other end, there can be a door or an opening through the wall there. Sometimes there's not, it just depends. There's sometimes there's sometimes isn't. There's more than a thousand of them that have been seen. They've flown airplanes and gotten a lot of aerial footage of these because you can see them super clearly from above. They just like these linear rectangular structures from above are really easy to see. So they've identified a lot through aerial photography and
00:29:19
Speaker
As far as I can tell, it looks like not a huge amount of excavation and research has been done into them. And this article is kind of representing one of the first like major excavations that has happened. At least that's how I interpreted it. That could be wrong because you know how it is when you're reading an article. Sometimes you don't really get the full picture of what the previous. But anyway, it seems like there hasn't been a lot of research in the past.
00:29:45
Speaker
So reading the article in the introduction, it says that there's thousands of stone structures, formations, whatever you want to call it, on the landscape in this area of Saudi Arabia. And there's way fewer of these, you know, we say rectangles, but in science we say rectilinear.
00:30:01
Speaker
Oh, true. That is a better word. That makes so much more sense because I'm trying to describe it. I'm like, well, it's rectangle, but it's not like it's a very specific kind of rectangle. So they're rectilinear and they just haven't been as well studied as some of the other things for whatever reason. Usually it takes research funding and somebody to have interest in something to go out and actually study these things. Other shapes and other types of stone, monumental stone architecture have been studied, but these just didn't
00:30:31
Speaker
where they ever get the treatment. Yeah. Like to be clear, it seems like the group of people that were, you know, occupying this area for thousands of years, they could, they created tons of different structures in this area. This is just one type of them that this study is focused on. And they did do some excavations specifically in that platform area that I mentioned that sort of, I want, I want to kind of call it the head of the structure because it feels like bigger and
00:30:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's bigger and you would potentially enter down at the other end and then kind of walk towards it. That's how I'm envisioning it anyway. The researchers did not say that in any way. That's like me envisioning some kind of like ritual happening where everybody like enters at one end and walks down to the platform.
00:31:13
Speaker
Anyway, so some of the platforms had niches in them and they excavated them to find out what was in there. And this is what I thought was super interesting because they found zero domestic occupation. They found no human remains. They don't seem to have used these as burials for human
00:31:29
Speaker
But they did find in situ faunal remains, they were primarily cattle with some goat and sheep and even some gazelle mixed in, but it was primarily cattle. So they excavated those out of a couple of the niches and then
00:31:45
Speaker
Some of the conclusions they're drawing is that the faunal remains appear to be like ritually placed in the niches and they might be from a sacrifice potentially. So the final conclusion which you could kind of get from that title that you read out is that there might have been some kind of like cattle cult.
00:32:03
Speaker
And they were like not worshipping cattle necessarily, but like the cattle were clearly a very important part of their lifestyle as far as food. And it sounds like everything kind of centered around cattle for them. So this could have been some kind of cattle cult. So.
00:32:21
Speaker
Speaking of that, these were originally called by the original researchers who I guess found them and started studying them. They were called gates due to their resemblance to traditional what's called a European field gate. But as with a lot of times when
00:32:37
Speaker
I guess European or Western researchers come in and name something that is familiar to them. Eventually, somebody wisens up and names it something related to the actual native cultures of that area, like Denali changing in Alaska, that kind of thing. But anyway, that's where the word mustotil comes from. It's Arabic for rectangle. And they wanted to distinguish them from these other field gate things that they found in Europe, because they are different and they seem to have different purposes or whatever. So they want them to be mixed up in the research.
00:33:06
Speaker
So yeah, that is super interesting and I liked this in particular because it's a lot of work to create these walls and these structures like they're very time intensive and there's tons of them.
00:33:20
Speaker
And it just is such a really cool thing to see that people are potentially using it as like a ritual or a sacrifice situation with the primary source of meat in their area. I'm guessing they were probably herding cattle at this point. I'm sure. Yeah, so like it was probably something to help them make sure that they were securing their food source in their whatever religion or whatever beliefs they had. So I think that's really neat.
00:33:48
Speaker
And I guess some of the previously unknown information, probably just because they hadn't looked, and you've mentioned this a little bit already, were the chambers that are within some of these bigger areas, which would actually make sense because you're out in the desert. Deserts get hot in the summertime and cold in the wintertime, although I don't know about Saudi Arabia. It's north of the equator, but not that far north, so I'm not sure. I mean, I was in the desert, the high desert of Tanzania in October of 2005.
00:34:18
Speaker
And I'll tell you what, it was cold at night. It was hot in the day and it was freezing cold at night. And just like the high desert in Nevada, it can be 100 degrees during the day, but 50 at night. So maybe if the people were hurting cattle into here and doing other things, maybe those chambers were used for
00:34:35
Speaker
I don't know, to sleep in, or to store things in, or to do whatever. Well, there is no evidence of domestic anything in there. But it could have been temporary. They could have just had their bed roll, they could have stayed in there. I'm just saying, things would have had multiple uses, and it's really cool that they have this almost self-contained area. The cattle are safe, and the
00:34:56
Speaker
Yeah, it does make you wonder if maybe because of the largeness of them, if they were somehow herding cattle into there or something like that, if it was like a... But you know what? No, because they would have found cattle droppings and things in the actual area itself.
00:35:14
Speaker
Hard to say. Yeah. Well, anyway, it's really interesting. I'm guessing there's lots more research to be done to really pin down exactly what they were using these things for, but it does seem to be related to their primary food source. I do like that the modern descendants of people from this area, they call pretty much the entire collection of stone structures that are found in this area as works of the old men. I really like that. Yeah, that's cool.
00:35:42
Speaker
Anyway, that's really neat. There's a ton more in this article. It's very thorough. Actually, a lot of times articles don't go into a lot of definitions and backstories. They expect you to just kind of look that up on your own because that's not their job to explain it. But this article explains a lot about the area, what they're actually talking about, some other things. They don't just present their research and then go into some conclusions. And there's a lot of pictures in the article as well, which really provides some good imagery of what we're talking about here.
00:36:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's really neat. We definitely recommend checking that out because if you do like I did originally and just skim the NBC article or one of the other major news sources, I think you're going to kind of miss the bigger point, which is how important cattle were to this society and what they were potentially doing spiritually to ensure their future food sources.
00:36:35
Speaker
Yeah, and I didn't look at the NBC article. I just looked at the article that you found, the original journal article. Did the NBC article link to this, or did you find it? It did not. I mean, they said it was in antiquity, and then I had to... Come on, NBC. I know. I had to go hunt it down. That seems like a typical media thing.
00:36:53
Speaker
I think a hallmark of good journalism is to actually cite your source in the picture. People can see it, otherwise it feels a little disingenuous like you're trying to say something and you don't expect people to verify what you're saying. That's probably not true. To be fair, it was very easy to find the article. It took a quick search and I found it, but I was like, come on, you guys get a link to it. They get a link to it.
00:37:16
Speaker
All right.
Support and Membership Perks
00:37:17
Speaker
Well, that's probably it for this episode. If you want to support us, we've had a number of new members lately, and we thank everybody for joining the APN and supporting us with what we do. Head on over to arcpodnet.com forward slash members to see the information about our plans. Basically what you're doing for, I think it's $7.99 a month. It's cheaper if you pay for the whole year all at once.
00:37:37
Speaker
Basically, what you're doing is you're supporting us in what we're doing. It's kind of like a donation. Although, we do let you get access to these episodes commercial-free and early, sometimes not too early. As early as we can. As early as we can get it edited. They're not available as a podcast necessarily that you can subscribe to, but if you go to one of the member pages, which we link you to when you become a member,
00:37:59
Speaker
then you can actually just listen to it on the website when it comes out. And you get notified of that in our Slack team, which is look up Slack if you don't know what that is, but it's free too. But we give you membership to our Slack team as a thank you for being a member so you can get notified of those early downloads and you can communicate with the hosts, with Rachel and I, with any of the hosts of the other podcasts and with any of the other members. We've got a lot of
00:38:22
Speaker
Good, continuing discussions going on over there for some of our other shows and for this show, as a matter of fact. Thank you, Jill, for continuing to comment and listen. That's amazing. It's awesome to know that people are listening. So again, head on over there, join the conversation, and thanks for listening. Thanks.
00:38:46
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment and view the show notes on the website at www.arcpodnet.com. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at arcpodnet. You can also find us on the Lyceum app, a podcast app just for educational podcasts. Music for this show is called I Wish You Would Look from the Band's Sea Hero. Again, thanks for listening and have an awesome day.
00:39:11
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.