We Excavated A 7,000-Year-Old Mustatil In Saudi Arabia

What were people in Arabia building 7,000 years ago?

In this video, I take you into the field in Saudi Arabia to excavate a Mustatil, one of the most distinctive and spectacular types of Neolithic monument in the Arabian Peninsula.

Mustatils are enormous stone structures, some stretching for hundreds of metres across the landscape. But what exactly were they, who built them, and what were they used for?

Join me in Saudi Arabia as we excavate one of these enormous Neolithic structures and uncover what lies beneath the surface. I'll show you what a Mustatil actually looks like on the ground, what we find inside them!

No AI is used in this video! Just real archaeology!

Links:
New Paper:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/art...
Other papers on Mustatil:
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2021.51
https://reference-global.com/article/...
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone....

With thanks to our project collaborators- the Saudi Arabian Heritage Commission. You can see more about their projects here
https://heritage.moc.gov.sa/en
https://x.com/MOCHeritage

We also thank the Royal Commission for AlUla under whose auspices we ran out project.
https://www.rcu.gov.sa/en
https://x.com/RCU_SA
All footage and photos used, other than from the papers, was taken during our initial projects with RCU and is copyright to The University of Sydney and the Royal Commission for AlUla.