A chance discovery of a group of megaliths on a coastal plain in western Yemen has sent scholars scrambling to explain why and how people were living there between ca. 2400 and 800 B.C. Known as al-Tihamah, the plain was thought to have been uninhabited until the eighth or ninth century A.D.
After a season studying a ninth-century A.D. mound outside the village of al-Mutaynah, Edward Keall, director of the Canadian Archaeological Mission of the Royal Ontario Museum, was directed to the new site by a local date farmer. "It was like going back to the nineteenth century in terms of the wonderment of discovery," says Keall, who found five 20-ton granite megaliths, three of which stood upright and measured eight feet tall. Another, more than 20 feet long, lay slanting out of the ground. Keall and his team investigated the adjacent areas and discovered more than a dozen other monoliths arranged in no obvious pattern.
"We don't know what was keeping people in this terribly marginal desert area," says Keall. "Was it a natural resource or a strategic position that prompted these people to invest such effort in erecting these remarkable monuments?" The absence of any archaeological materials in the region between 800 B.C. and A.D. 800 is also a conundrum. Keall is planning further surveys this winter.
Thanks to Andy B for the link. For more, see archive.archaeology.org.
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