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

Scattered across Saudi Arabia are thousands of monumental stone structures older than the pyramids. They're called mustateel. Built around 7,000 years ago, these immense structures have puzzled archaeologists for decades. What are they? Why were they built? What were they used for? Well, a new research paper has just been published that explores the excavation of several mustateel. And in this video, I'm going to bring you all the exciting new data. And why should you listen to me? Well, I just happen to be one of the co-authors of that paper. Hi, I'm Dr. Hugh Thomas. Today in this video, let's dig deeper into the excavation results of these amazing structures. Hi, I'm Hugh. If you're new here, I have a PhD in archaeology, and for the last 25 years or so, I've been taking part in archaeological field work all across the world. And for the last several years, I've been one of the two co-directors of the Prehistoric Project. Now, whereas I focus on the funerary landscapes of Al-Ula and Khaybar in northwest Saudi Arabia, my co-director, Dr. Melissa Kennedy, is the world specialist on these phenomenal structures known as mustateel. So before I get into the results of this paper, if you're new to mustateel, let's look at some of the basics. Okay, so Saudi Arabia is covered in millions of stone structures of various shapes, circles, triangles, but also rectangles. And it's these rectangles that are mustateel, which is the Arabic word for rectangle. Now, despite being first archaeologically identified in 1977, it wasn't until 2018 that the first mustateel was excavated. Not by us, but a few months later, we excavated our first one, and then another, and then another, and then another. And during this time, we were also recording, photographing, and surveying hundreds more. So what do we uncover during the excavation and survey of mustateel? They range in size from about 20 meters in length up to the granddaddy of them all, this one, which is over 600 meters long. That is the equivalent of over six football fields. In an old paper of ours, we estimated how long it would take to build one of these structures, specifically focusing on one that was 525 meters long and comprised of about 12,000 tons of basalt. And based off that, we think that it's highly likely that groups of people were coming together to build them. Otherwise, it would take forever. And in this time period, which is the Neolithic, we're dealing with a group of people that you'd call mobile pastoralists. That is, they have domesticated animals, but they need to move those animals around to keep them well-fed and watered. Now, mustateel are all made of the same basic components. Now, the two short ends of the mustateel are higher and thicker. One of those short ends is what we call the base, which contains an entranceway into the structure. Now, the entrances into these structures are pretty small, only about 30 to 40 centimeters, which is about that wide. Outside the entrances, we find some associated structures being built, like these circular structures with these large vertical stones in them, or these fun little platforms that look like the capital letter I. In some instances, these are built so close to the structures that you'd have to shimmy around them in order to get into the entranceway. It's almost like they're trying to make it difficult for people to enter these things. The other short end is the head, which contains an offering chamber, which I'll get into in a second. Now, these two short ends are connected by two or more long walls, creating a rectangle. Now, the center of this structure is what we call a courtyard. Sometimes you might get three or more long walls, which means you get multiple courtyards. Now, these long walls can sometimes be reasonably nice, but a lot of the time they're pretty simple. A lot of these long walls have gaps in them. Some are even barely recognizable. They're not designed to act as a wall or a fence to hold anything in or keep anything out. We think they're really just used to sort of demarcate this space. And a lot of musatil are built directly on bedrock and not covered by sand or sediment, so it's not like these long walls are just being hidden underneath sand. And in the few instances where they are, well, we dig there too. Now, musatil are found in a variety of different locations. Some are hidden in valleys, some are exposed on big rocky flats, some are located on the tops of steep mountains, or even running up the side of But it's in the offering chamber on one of the short ends of the musatil that all the kind of cool stuff happens. Because when we excavate musatil after musatil, inside of these offering chambers we find the same thing over and over again. The upper cranial elements of horned animals. Primarily cattle, along with some sheep, goat, and the odd wild animal like a gazelle. So what I mean by upper cranial elements is that if you take the skeleton of, say, a goat or cattle, we don't find any of this. We only find this bit of them. We just don't find any other bones from the rest of the animal. And it's not like there's an issue with preservation. In some instances we're finding phenomenally well-preserved skulls and horns. Now, in musatil you do find the odd artifact or two, but not much. And I've made videos about this before. And we do find human remains in some, but they always seem to date to centuries after the main use of the musatil. So we've been able to work out how old the musatil are in a couple of different ways. First and foremost, we can take the animal bones and charcoal that have been found in these offering chambers and do C14 dating. But we've also done this thing called OSL dating, which I've talked about before, but it's effectively where you can date when sediment was last exposed to sunlight. And all the dates match up really nicely, suggesting that the ones we've excavated so far were built between about 5300 and 4700 BCE. And the cattle and sheep goat that we have here are some of the earliest domesticated animals that have been found in this region. So obviously they were important to people during the Neolithic. So sacrificing one and lopping off the top of its head and shoving it in a musatil was obviously something that was particularly moving to them. That was so bad. Oh man, I didn't even script that one. That just came out. Whoa. Oh, and by the way, there are lots of musatil, over 1600 of them, found in an area the size of Poland. So what are these things? Well, we think they're ritual structures. Hey, sorry to interrupt, but if you like real archaeology, like the amazing site of Pompeii, why don't you click that subscribe button and make sure to turn on notifications so you don't miss a video. Now my co-director wouldn't like me to use the word temple, but our theory is that most were built for something to do with water, as both our team and other researchers have noted that many musatil have a relationship with water. Now I can hear a collective groan from a number of you over the fact that we're calling these ritual structures. And here's the thing. At the beginning, we were debating about what these structures are. And inevitably, a lot of the thoughts we had in the early days are probably going to end up in the comments. So let's go through them all and debunk them one by one. Number one, they're hunting traps. Things like kites. Now kites are monumental hunting traps, and we have a lot of them in this region. Some even reuse musatil, and they are very different. As mentioned before, and as you'll see in this video, the entrances to these structures are often tiny, really difficult to get into. The long walls often have holes in them. There are no kill pits like kites, so getting animals into these things and killing them doesn't really work. And also, if they were for hunting wild animals, why do we find primarily domesticated animals in the offering chambers? Number two, they're stockyards or corrals. Again, remember the holes in the walls which ain't keeping anything in or out, even if they were filled with natural materials. But also, a lot of these musatil are in places which cattle just couldn't get to. On the tops of mountains, up crazy steep slopes like volcanoes and mountains. A lot of these hills are quite difficult to get up, so I have no idea how you're getting cattle up there as well. So to me, this theory falls down quicker than a cow would on these slopes. Number three, they're houses. Now we have domestic structures from this time period. I've actually made a video on this topic before. Those domestic structures are filled with typical domestic assemblages like you'd find in any domestic structure from the Neolithic period in West Asia. Musatil just aren't filled with that material. And also, why would you build a house that's 600 meters long? Number four, they're tombs. As mentioned, we do find human remains in some, but they're always just little bits of human remains. And they're always hundreds of years after the primary use of the musatil. Now, if there's anything I've missed, feel free to chuck it in the comments below and I'll try and answer it for you. But you can see how we've come up with our conclusions based off all of the evidence and also the bits and pieces that we don't actually find in these structures. But there is one big issue with all of our excavations of previous musatil. Because although we've surveyed hundreds of them over a huge area of about 40,000 square kilometers, when you look at the musatil that we've excavated, they are all located within a radius of like 30 kilometers. So we've always wondered, are the musatil that we've excavated in this relatively small area, are they representative of the musatil tradition across all of Saudi Arabia? Or is it just like a little regional thing over in Al-Ula? And actually, if we looked at musatil elsewhere, we'll find something completely different. But we also thought that although there are a lot of musatil in Al-Ula, when you go across the border to Kaibar, there are significantly more. So we decided we wanted to excavate some musatil down in Kaibar for two reasons. One, the density of the musatil down there is just immense. But secondly, it's like 150 kilometers away from the ones we'd excavated in Al-Ula. So if something different was happening, we would hopefully see it that far away. But the problem is, is that our permit didn't allow us to excavate down there. So our funders, the Royal Commission for Al-Ula, who are the ones who let us excavate around Al-Ula and in parts of Kaibar, reached out to the Heritage Commission and set up a collaboration between us, allowing us, along with the Heritage Commission, to excavate a number of musatil in Kaibar. And we decided to go to this spot. So why here? Well, as part of an earlier project with the Royal Commission for Al-Ula, we had already surveyed this area. In fact, all of the drone footage and most of the photos that I'm showing up on the screen for this video is from that project. So we knew this site was amazing. Why? Well, because around this alluvial depression, a thing called a kar, there are a lot of musatil. One of the highest concentrations of musatil in any area. There are 28 of them. So with our collaborative partners, the Heritage Commission, in 2023, we got to work surveying and excavating the musatil around this area. Collecting teeth fragments from the surface? Yep, you can still find 7,000 year old cattle teeth fragments on the surface of some musatil. And we partially excavated three of them. So what do we find? The first thing we realized is that the entrances to these musatil are bonkers. They're awesome. So remember I mentioned that the entranceways into the musatil are quite small and that these extra structures are often quite close to the entrance, making the musatil really hard to enter. Well, in Kaibar, they took this and they dialed it up to 11. In one of the musatil in Kaibar, the entranceway was an oval chamber with a small entrance on either side. And inside that oval chamber, it was filled with stacked towers of stone. You'd actually have to kind of shimmy your way between these stacked towers of stone and avoid knocking them down. Now, about 20 something kilometers away from this site, there is another musatil that has a very similar thing, but like to the extreme. In this musatil, the entrance is a series of corridors, inside of which is a veritable forest of these stacked towers of stone, which now have all been knocked over. To get into this, you would need to weave in and out and avoid bumping them. But my favorite musatil is this one because out the front of it, you had these stacked towers of stone. But as you walked past those, you came up to these rows of stone platforms and in those platforms were tunnels. Our theory is that the gaps between these platforms were quite small. So to enter this musatil, you actually had to get on your hands and knees and crawl through these tunnels in order to get to the entranceway. How cool is that? So why make it difficult to enter one of these structures? Well, we think it might have been performative. Take crawling in on your hands and knees through tunnels. If you go to the tiny Greek island of Tinos, and as someone who has worked on nearby Andros for some time and visited Tinos a I highly recommend it. It is a beautiful island. The main focal point of the main town is the church of Panagia Panagialistria, where even today people crawl between 500 to 800 meters uphill to the church in order to show their faith. So we think what's happening with our 7,000 year old musatil where you're crawling in on your hands and knees is quite similar to our church in Tinos, that you are crawling in and causing great discomfort and pain to yourself in order to show your commitment to your god, gods, or whatever the people in the Neolithic believed. But as always, if you've got any other further ideas, let me know down in the comments. You might have noticed that a lot of our towers of stone have fallen over and there's a lot of stone kind of wedged into these tunnels, for example. We actually think that stones were put there on purpose in order to decommission the structure. Basically, it's where you block it up so other people couldn't use it. But apart from surveying these structures and seeing the awesome bases, we were also able to excavate them. But in typical fashion that happens on an archaeological project when you're working in an arid region, it rained. And that meant that we were not able to excavate nearly as much as we hoped. But we got a number of days in there and we got some really cool results. So the first thing we were able to answer is, were the Kaibar musatils filled with the same kinds of upper cranial elements of horned animals as their Al'Ula counterparts? Yep, they were. Again, the animal bones that were identifiable were pretty much just cattle. There are a few caprine bones and the bones also of animals like rodents and hares, the things that probably use these as burrows. And again, the bones that we could identify were all from the upper parts of the skull. So despite being about 150 kilometers away, these musatil had the exact same kind of stuff in them. One of the other big questions we had is, with so many musatil being down in Kaibar, is this the location that was the birthplace of the musatil tradition? Is this where we're going to find the earliest examples? The C14 dates out of the three excavated musatil, along with some of the surface samples collected from other musatil at the site, are all actually later than our Al'Ula excavations. So right now, Al'Ula is potentially the birthplace of this tradition. I'm going to put a huge asterisk over that comment and say that, you know, we're dealing with small amounts of data here. You know, less than 20 musatil have been excavated of 1600. So the evidence that we have at the moment is pointing towards Al'Ula, but that could change. But the other really interesting thing about the C14 dates of these musatil is that they both overlap and don't overlap, meaning that some of these musatil were in use at the same time. But there is also evidence that after some were probably decommissioned, they built more. And when we combine the C14 dates from Al'Ula with those that we now have from Kaibar, it demonstrates that musatil were built for a really long time. The earliest musatil in Al'Ula was built about 400 to 500 years earlier than our oldest example that we've identified in Kaibar so far. The dates of all these suggest that musatil were built for a period of almost a thousand years. And that has really startling ramifications. That over a thousand years, Neolithic people built massive stone structures and filled them with ritual offerings at the tops of horned animal heads. Now, the basic design of musatil seems to have stayed relatively stable, although there are variations between the regions with things like the base and how you enter these structures. But the core components, they're the same. It means that we have this huge Neolithic culture, probably had the same belief system, the same language and more. And the best thing is that we are just scratching the surface. You know, there are over 1600 musatil across Arabia and what, like around 20 of them have been excavated? Like that's a tiny percentage. So I keep thinking how cool it's going to be to be an archaeologist in this region over the coming years as more of these are excavated and published. Our understanding of musatil is just going to get deeper and deeper. It's just so awesome to be like a super tiny part of that. And it just keeps making me think like, how cool is archaeology? And speaking of cool, you know what would be cool for you to do? Click that subscribe button. Oh, I'm sorry for that one. As always, I'd love it if you could comment below. Tell me what you think of this video. Tell me your theories about musatil, what you think we might find in them in the future. And of course, like, share, comment, hype, do all the things that you need to do in order for you and other people to see my content in the future. Anything you can do to support my channel, I'd really appreciate it. Thank you so much for watching. Cheers.