Presenting the world's oldest architectural plans

One of the excavation sites is located in southeastern Jordan, on the arid and remote Jibal al-Khashabiyeh plateau.

On this 3D model of the monolith the researchers produced an interpretative drawing (which can be clearly seen in the second image from the left). This represents the plan of a gigantic prehistoric structure designed to trap wild animals. Such structures, called desert kites because of their shape, generally have three features, as in this drawing: a corridor (seen in the lower part of the image) leading to a large enclosure surrounded by a number of pits (the small round shapes in the drawing).

This aerial view shows part of the kite's vast enclosure and the small pits surrounding it, the plan of which is engraved on the monolith. According to the researchers, the ability to transpose such a large area onto a small surface represents an important step in the intellectual development of humans.

The archaeologist Wael Abu-Azizeh, co-author of the paper, seen examining an excavated pit in the Jordanian desert kite. The pits, of which there are around ten in the enclosures in this region, have an internal wall reinforced by stone facing, and were sometimes dug down to a depth of as much as two metres below the surface.

In addition to being to scale, the plan engraved on the monolith (right) includes several very precise details carved in bas-relief to a depth of 0.5 to 1 cm (left thumbnails). These include fine incisions (especially to delineate the contours of the kite), scraping and pecking.

In another Jordanian desert kite, a kind of path can be seen on the right, marking the convergence point of walls several kilometres long, that the animals followed all the way to the large enclosure, from which they then fell into the pits placed all around it.

The archaeologists also worked at a site in northern Saudi Arabia. There, in a dried up river bed (wadi) that cuts through the plateau of Jebel az-Zilliyat, they found another engraved block (indicated by the circle) that proved to be of great significance for their work on desert kites.

The block found in Saudi Arabia, which had fallen off the edge of an overhanging cliff, features an engraving also described by the researchers and that they date to around 8,000 years ago. The engraving is much larger than the one found in Jordan, and is drawn on the flat surface of a massive sandstone block about 4 metres long.

The Saudi engraving actually depicts two kites, an aerial view of one of which is shown here. More than 6,600 desert kites have been discovered to date in regions ranging from Kazakhstan to Saudi Arabia.

Until now, only a few schematic representations of desert kites were known. Those recently analysed by Rémy Crassard (right), Jacques Élie Brochier (left), Wael Abu-Azizeh, Olivier Barge and their colleagues, were engraved with very great precision. They bear witness to a widely underestimated ability to master spatial perception at such early times, when neither writing nor mathematics yet existed.