Desert kites and prehistoric periods in Iranian plateau

The known area of distribution of kites is very large, from Arabia and the Near East, to Armenia in the Caucasus and the Aralo-Caspian region, namely south-western Kazakhstan and western Uzbekistan (e.g. Barge et al. 2013).although still there is not any official report about its existence in Iranian plateau but regards to the vast distribution of desert kites from Egypt in west to Kazakhstan in east, it is not so worth if we expect to see this prehistoric phenomena in Iranian territory also. The kite structures, typologically well known for decades and often interpreted as giant hunting traps or game drives, are being reappraised by means of a research project called Globalkites (Crassard et al. 2014).These structures, comprising long driving walls or stone alignments (antennae) converging towards an enclosure surrounded by small closed rooms (cells), are being studied through different approaches, including archaeology and geomatics, geoarchaeology, environmental studies, zooarchaeology and animal ethology (e.g. Barge, Brochier & Crassard, this volume 2015; Chahoud, Vila & Crassard, this volume 2015). Desert kites is a term coined in Near Eastern archaeology for describing large game drives solely found in arid and semi-arid environments. Most kites can be grouped into two major types with many varieties: small triangular, V-shaped structures, and large enclosure-like (Betts and Helms, 1986 Helms and Betts, 1987; Echallier and Braemer, 1995; Betts et al., 1998; Betts and Yagodin, 2000; Kempe and Al-Malabeh, 2010; Kennedy, 2012; Bar-Oz and Nadel, 2013; Barge et al., 2013; Brochier et al., 2014; Crassard et al., 2014). Desert kites were first identified in the Near East in the 1920s. In spite of relatively widespread archaeological research, many fundamental questions surrounding these structures have still not been satisfactorily resolved. The age of kites remains uncertain, as the only rare chronological is centered on the Bronze Age (Echallier and Braemer, 1995; Van Berg et al., 2004; Nadel et al.,2010; Brochier et al., 2014). However, certain authors claim that some of these structures are Neolithic (Helms and Betts, 1987; Akkermans et al., 2014; Iamoni, 2014; Morandi Bonacossi, 2014), while petroglyphs depicting kites point towards a classical age (Harding, 1953; Kennedy and Henderson, 2012), and historical evidence of collective hunting could implicate the use of kites (Burckhardt, 1835; Barker, 1876; Mitford, 1884; Wright, 1895; Musil, 1928a,b), although correlations between the described kites and those observed here still have to be confirmed (Brochier et al., 2014). The long-term use of these structures thus appears likely. The constructions are generally believed to have been used to catch herds of wild ungulates. Desert kites consist of two low dry-stone walls, of variable thickness and height that begin far apart and gradually move closer to create a V or funnel shape. The narrow opening at the end of the funnel leads to a circular enclosure or a pit. The enclosure can range from a few meters to a hundred meters in diameter and the walls may extend for hundreds of meters and evenseveral kilometers. Their shape and archeological evidence suggest that these extensive stone structures may have functioned as game traps, designed to capture and kill large numbers of wild animals. Most desert kites were built between 4000 BCE to 2000 BCE but some of these structures could be dated as far back as 8000 BCE. Radiocarbon dates on charcoal within the kite pits are used to date the time that the kites were in use. Charcoal isn t typically found along the walls, at least not associated with the hunting strategy, and luminescence of the rock walls has been used to date them. The main questions regarding the kites’ expansion focus on their function(s) and how they worked, on their dating and on the reason(s) why such a wide distribution occurred through time.