This publication project, directed by Dr. Rémy Crassard, addresses the understudied topic of animal trapping in human prehistory and how large-scale trapping strategies impacted landscapes, biodiversity dynamics, and human social organization in different regions of Eurasia. The publication will focus on gigantic trapping structures, the so-called desert kites (or simply ‘kites’), which were first recognized in the 1920s from airplanes.
Thanks to archaeological excavations and geomatics explorations, we proved the unequivocal and most probably exclusive function of the kites as hunting traps. Their gigantic size and the considerable amount of energy and organization involved in building these game drives led to their designation as “mega-traps” and the interpretation of their use as a communal hunting device. In addition, datable elements within the kites helped resolve the chronology of these structures from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. Lastly, our understanding of the broad spatial distribution of this “kite phenomenon” was increased by field studies, especially in Jordan, as well as with satellite imagery interpretation across the Middle East, Caucasus and Central Asia.
This publication project concerns thus the Jordanian “window” that we wish to publish in detail, in a region where kites are extremely numerous: the Harrat al-Shaam Desert. Based on our previous fieldworks from 2009 to 2015, we are well-positioned to address questions about animal trapping strategies as an aspect of human hunting behavior that may have been crucial to survival of human groups in particular environments. Hunting in past societies has been widely studied by archaeologists for decades, but the trapping techniques of hunting have never been comprehensively addressed. This publication project will fill the gap by applying a complete expertise from many disciplines, including archaeology and social anthropology, bioarchaeology and geoarchaeology, geomatics and statistics, geochronology and radiochronology, combined with a dataset based on a large body of previously detected archaeological structures visible from satellite imagery, and a huge, never-published, dataset of excavated structures.
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