How it began
In June 2015 the South-Eastern Badia Archaeological Project found an engraved limestone block at Jibal al-Khashabiyeh in southeastern Jordan. The stone is about 80 cm long, 32 cm wide and 18 cm thick. It shows a desert kite, a very large stone hunting trap, at a scale of about 1 to 425. The eight kites nearby and their pit traps date to about 7000 BCE, and the engraving is dated by association with them. A second engraving, about 8,000 years old, was found at Jebel az-Zilliyat in Saudi Arabia. The team published both in 2023 as the oldest known plans to scale.
Before it existed
Earlier images of built spaces from the Stone Age are few, schematic and not accurate. Rock drawings of kites were already known from Jordan, Syria and Uzbekistan, but they are undated and not to scale, and none shows the pit traps as carved hollows. The kites themselves are so large that their whole layout cannot be taken in from the ground.
How it works
A desert kite is made of low stone walls, the driving lines, which run from hundreds of meters to 5 km and converge on an enclosure of about one hectare ringed by pits up to 4 meters deep. Herds of wild animals such as gazelles were driven along the walls into the pits. The Jordanian engraving shows all three parts: the driving lines as fine incisions, a star-shaped enclosure, and round pit traps pecked out as hollows 0.5 to 1 cm deep. Its shape and proportions match the real kites close by.
What changed first
The authors suggest the plans were needed to share spatial information, either to plan the building of a kite or to organize a collective hunt in a structure nobody could see whole. They argue that the technical demands of the kites pushed their builders toward this kind of drawing.
What lasted
The paper, by Remy Crassard, Wael Abu-Azizeh, Mohammad Tarawneh and colleagues, concludes that the engravings show a mastery of space and abstract representation not previously documented so early. They move the record of drawing a structure to scale back to the Neolithic, thousands of years before plans known from literate societies.
