ARCHEORIENT. Environnements et sociétés de l'Orient ancien (UMR 5133)

High-resolution satellite imagery publicly accessible on the Internet (e.g. Google Earth, Microsoft Bing) greatly facilitates the observation of large archaeological structures. This is particularly the case for 'desert kites', dry-stone constructions comprising long convergent walls with an associated enclosure. Recent publications have significantly increased the number of known kites, including in regions where they had never before been reported (e.g. Kennedy 2012; Kempe & Al-Malabeh 2013). Previous research projects have been numerous (e.g. Helms & Betts 1987; Échallier & Braemer 1995) but isolated and at a regional scale only. Additionally, researchers were regularly faced with a scarcity of archaeological material, which often had no clear stratigraphic relationship to the kite structures. Thus,
apart from a few isolated cases (Holzer et al. 2010), key issues such as dating kites and understanding their function have not been satisfactorily resolved. Hypotheses have been proposed based on historical evidence, rock carvings and faunal remains, some of them from sites interpreted as mass killing sites. These data are still insufficient, however, due to the unsystematic nature of the studies, and the current hypotheses cannot explain such a large spatial distribution (from the Arabian Peninsula to the Aralo-Caspian region) and presumably long chronology (from the Neolithic to sub-contemporary times).