RAF pilots flying over the Middle East in the 1920s kept seeing huge shapes laid out on the ground that nobody walking across them had noticed: two long stone walls converging into an enclosure, with a tail. Group Captain Lionel Rees said they looked like toy kites, and the name stuck. More than 6,000 desert kites are now known, from Uzbekistan to Libya, some of them running for several kilometers. In parts of Syria there is roughly one every two square kilometers.
The walls are dry stone and less than a meter high, which is why the structures jump out from a plane and disappear on foot. They were built to trap animals. The lines were laid along breaks in the slope, so an animal inside a kite can't see where the walls are taking it, and research published in 2022 found pits several meters deep at the far end, screened by low walls so a running gazelle wouldn't see one until it was too close to turn. Animals treat even a low line as a barrier and follow it looking for a gap instead of stepping over it.
The oldest dated kites go back to the early Holocene, which makes them the most complex structures people were building at the time. Very few have been excavated, and archaeologists still argue over whether some were used to manage livestock rather than trap wild game.
Previously:
• Drones still revealing Nazca geoglyphs—hundreds of them
• "Crop Circles" Reveal an Ancient Burial Site
