A team of Jordanian and French archaeologists say they have found a temple about 9,000 years old at a remote Neolithic site in the eastern desert of Jordan.
A team of Jordanian and French archaeologists say they have found a temple about 9,000 years old at a remote Neolithic site in the eastern desert of Jordan.
A team of Jordanian and French archaeologists said on Tuesday that it has found a nearly 9,000-year-old temple at a remote Neolithic site in Jordan’s eastern desert.
The ritual complex was found in a Neolithic camp near large structures known as “desert kites” or collective nets, which are believed to have been used by wild gazelles for slaughter.
This type of trap consists of two or more long stone walls that meet to form an enclosure and are found scattered throughout the deserts of the Middle East.
“The site is unique, first of all because of its conservation status,” said Jordanian archaeologist Wael Abu-Aziza, co-director of the project. “It’s 9,000 years old and everything was almost intact.”
Within the shrine were two carved standing stones with anthropomorphic figures, one of which was a representation of a “desert kite”, as well as miniature models of an altar, hearth, sea shells and gazelle nets.
The temple “sheds a whole new light on the symbolism, artistic expression as well as the spiritual culture of a hitherto unknown Neolithic population,” the researchers said in a statement.
The site’s proximity to the traps suggests that the inhabitants were specialized hunters and that the traps were “the center of their cultural, economic and even symbolic life in this frontier region,” the statement said.
The team included archaeologists from Al Hussein bin Talal University in Jordan and the French Institute of the Near East. The site was excavated during the most recent excavation season in 2021.
