When McMahon arrived, she explained that the circle of rocks next to me were the remains of a house inhabited during the Neolithic period (6000 to 4500 BC) and that the area was once dotted with thriving settlements. Until recently, the prevailing wisdom was that there was little human activity in this region until the Bronze Age after 4000 BC. But the work of McMahon and her colleagues revealed a very different story: that Neolithic Saudi Arabia was a dynamic, densely populated, complex landscape spread over a vast area.
There were more than 30 dwellings and tombs around me, and this was only a small part of the remains here. I tried to imagine the landscape as it might have been thousands of years ago: green, lush, and teeming with people moving noisily around, herding goats, and shouting to each other.
“The climate and inert landscape of Saudi Arabia means that most of the archeology is fairly well preserved on the surface from 5,000 to 8,000 years ago. So just as you see, it’s the way it was all that time ago,” McMahon said, explaining that understanding more about the lives of these early people 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 irrigated agriculture, metalworking, and written texts, occurred in the following millennia.
“The cultural changes that have occurred since the Neolithic have been enormous, but we don’t know much about how those changes happened,” she said.
However, even in the hands of such experienced archaeologists, one AlUla discovery continues to elude explanation. Spread over an area of a staggering 300,000 sq km and built in a fairly consistent pattern, there are 1,600 monumental rectangular stone structures that also date to the Neolithic period. Originally called “gates” because of their appearance from the air, the structures were later renamed “mustatil,” which translates to “rectangle” in Arabic.
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