Parallels to Head-Smashed-In: Indigenous Hunting in Jordan and Syria

Join us for a fascinating lecture by Yorke M. Rowan, Research Associate Professor at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago

In the early 20th century, British and French pilots flying over the Black Desert of present-day Jordan and Syria spotted thousands of structures. In this arid land, one type of structure stood out to them for the similarity in shape to a child’s kite. These ‘desert kites’ are known now to occur in the thousands, stretching from northern Saudi Arabia to southern Syria, with similar features found even further afield. Although those aviators thought the desert kites might be to corral domesticated animals or be defensive, current consensus holds that these kites are drivelines gradually converging towards an enclosure or kill site. Like hunting drive lines in other regions of the world, the structures frequently use local topography to advantage, obscuring the enclosure and trap cells. Recent research suggests that these kites began to be built during the later phases of the Neolithic, around 7000 cal BC, but they may have continued in use for millennia. The construction of hunting infrastructure on such an impressive landscape scale required on-going, extensive and organized labor investment, indicating a major shift in the ways people used the landscape and interacted across large regions.

Discover how these Neolithic hunting systems compare to the buffalo jumps of the Northern Plains and what they tell us about human ingenuity and adaptation.