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Spreading over a vast, remote landscape in north-western Saudi Arabia are millennia-old archaeological remains that could change our understanding of prehistory.
The car was gliding smoothly along the immaculately maintained highway in AlUla, a region in north-western Saudi Arabia, when my driver abruptly veered off the road. “I missed the turning,” he said. I looked out of the window in confusion as I couldn’t see an obvious bend. “Here,” he exclaimed, as the car jolted across basalt rocks to join a barely discernible path into the desert.
We drove into a vast, flat landscape. A bright blue sky enclosed us on all sides and a smattering of white clouds hung low. After a few minutes, we stopped by acircle of stacked stones. I climbed out of the car, waiting to meet Jane McMahon, part of a team of archaeologists from the University of Western Australia that has been working in AlUla since 2018. All around me was an arid plain of grey-black rocks lightly dusted in pink-hued sand. There was something otherworldly about it all: the lack of a single tree or a blade of grass; the stillness of the air that was only occasionally interrupted by a bitter gust of wind that chilled you to the bone.
I’d come here because recent discoveries in AlUla are shining a light on a fascinating period of history in Saudi Arabia. Since the nation only opened for international research a few years ago (and to tourists in 2019), many of its ancient sites are being studied for the first time. While historians are familiar with the ruins of the 2,000-year-old cities Hegra and Dadan and their place on the Incense Route (Hegra’s tombs and monuments are a Unesco World Heritage Site), they didn’t have much knowledge about the civilisation that came before, until now.
What has been discovered is that spread over AlUla’s vast, remote landscape are millennia-old archaeological remains that could change our understanding of prehistory. Work by McMahon and her colleagues is shedding light on some of the earliest stone monuments in world history – predating Stonehenge and the earliest pyramid in Giza.
When McMahon arrived, she explained that the circle of rocks next to me was the remains of a house occupied in the Neolithic period (from 6000 to 4500 BCE), and that this area was once scattered with thriving settlements. Until recently, the prevailing wisdom was that this region had little human activity until the Bronze Age after 4000 BCE. But McMahon and her colleagues’ work has unearthed a very different story: that Neolithic Saudi Arabia was a dynamic, intensely populated, complex landscape spread over a vast area.
“The climate and inert landscape of Saudi Arabia means most of the archaeology is pretty well preserved on the surface from 5,000 to 8,000 years ago. So exactly as you see it is how it was all that time ago,” McMahon said, explaining that understanding more about the lives of these early peoples could also shed light on how the large, dense settlements of Hegra and Dedan developed, and how cultural and technological changes in the region, such as irrigation farming, metalworking and written texts, came about over the following millennia.
“The cultural changes that took place following the Neolithic are huge, but we don’t know a lot of how those changes happened,” she said.
However, even in the hands of such experienced archaeologists, one AlUla discovery has continued to elude explanation. Spread over an area of a staggering 300,000 sq km and built to a fairly consistent type, are 1,600 monumental rectangular stone structures that also date to the Neolithic period. Initially named “gates” due to their appearance from the air, the structures were later renamed “mustatil”, which translates to “rectangle” in Arabic.
BBC
