Archaeologists find 9,000-year-old shrine in Jordan desert : NPR

This picture reveals two carved standing stones at a distant Neolithic website in Jordan’s japanese desert. A workforce of Jordanian and French archaeologists mentioned Tuesday that it had discovered a roughly 9,000-year-old shrine.

Jordan Tourism Ministry/by way of AP

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Jordan Tourism Ministry/by way of AP

This picture reveals two carved standing stones at a distant Neolithic website in Jordan’s japanese desert. A workforce of Jordanian and French archaeologists mentioned Tuesday that it had discovered a roughly 9,000-year-old shrine.

Jordan Tourism Ministry/by way of AP

AMMAN, Jordan — A workforce of Jordanian and French archaeologists mentioned Tuesday that it had discovered a roughly 9,000-year-old shrine at a distant Neolithic website in Jordan’s japanese desert.

The ritual advanced was present in a Neolithic campsite close to giant buildings often called “desert kites,” or mass traps which are believed to have been used to corral wild gazelles for slaughter.

Such traps include two or extra lengthy stone partitions converging towards an enclosure and are discovered scattered throughout the deserts of the Center East.

“The positioning is exclusive, first due to its preservation state,” mentioned Jordanian archaeologist Wael Abu-Azziza, co-director of the undertaking. “It is 9,000 years previous and every little thing was nearly intact.”

Inside the shrine had been two carved standing stones bearing anthropomorphic figures, one accompanied by a illustration of the “desert kite,” in addition to an altar, fireside, marine shells and miniature mannequin of the gazelle entice.

The researchers mentioned in a press release that the shrine “sheds a whole new mild on the symbolism, creative expression in addition to religious tradition of those hitherto unknown Neolithic populations.”

The proximity of the location to the traps suggests the inhabitants had been specialised hunters and that the traps had been “the middle of their cultural, financial and even symbolic life on this marginal zone,” the assertion mentioned.

The workforce included archaeologists from Jordan’s Al Hussein Bin Talal College and the French Institute of the Close to East. The positioning was excavated throughout the newest digging season in 2021.