A Rock Art Depiction of a Desert Kite Hunting Drive Trap

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

A recently discovered petroglyph panel in the Har Tzuriaz region of the southern Negev, Israel, depicts a typical desert kite, a form of drive trap used for millennia to hunt gazelle. The depiction closely approximates an actual desert kite located less than a kilometer away, but not in direct line of sight. Such specific depictions are rare. OSL dating of sediments accumulated at the head of the kite, in the killing cell, date construction to the sixth millennium BCE, but relative dating of the petroglyph based on patina and superposition, and initial chemical dates based on magnesium and iron accumulation, indicates a Classical era date, thus reflecting a gap of roughly five millennia between the construction of the kite and the composition of the art. The discrepancy between the two reflects the cumulative nature of constructed landscape in the desert, as well as likely reuse and re-understanding of the desert kite in later periods.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36185.0