Kites, Dragons, and Other Traps

"So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round; ... "
Kubla Khan

 "... The verdurous wall of Paradise up sprung: ... "
Paradise Lost iv, 143

The earliest prehistoric hunters clearly understood that the most efficient way to hunt large animals is to force them into a narrow space where they have room neither to maneuver nor escape.[1]   The many techniques for accomplishing this have left unmistakable traces on the landscape; over the last century aerial surveys and archaeology both have revealed thousands of examples.   

A related hunting method is to take things out of nature's hands and introduce game into confined spaces (such as islands) to create huntable areas on otherwise unproductive land.  There are indications that certain uninhabited islands in the Mediterranean were, in the Late Neolithic or the BA, deliberately stocked with populations of deer, goat, swine, or hare in order to create such at-need hunting spaces.[2]

To create efficient animal traps human populations must take advantage of the migration patterns of the ungulates (reindeer, gazelle, antelope, caribou, bison, several species of deer, and cattle such as the aurochs (Bos primigenius)) and build guide walls and corrals across these routes in such a way that animals would unexpectedly find themselves trapped. [3] These corrals (they are often equipped with hunting blinds) can be positioned behind large boulders or at the break of an up-sloping ridge where they cannot be seen by the game until it is too late.[4]   For example it has long been the custom to trap migrating gazelle on the high Tibetan plain in just this way.[5]  The walls that guide these ungulates into the corrals do not have to be substantial; nor do they require as much work as often appears.[6]   Such walls often consist of no more than a long line of stones or cairns; which can even be noncontiguous.  This is the case in Canada towards the Arctic Circle.[7]  There, the mere presence of a few people (or even a simple human-like arrangment of stones) behind the animals or to the sides is always enough to keep them 'within bounds' so to speak.[8]   By the time they encounter the inevitable corral, water barrier, or dead-fall they are well within the range of armed killers.  

       In the period after WWI, and during the course of air mail runs between Cairo and Baghdad, pilots noticed (and photographed) extensive arrangements of long stone lines in the Jordanian desert.   Due to the shape of these lines the pilots began to refer to them as 'kites' or 'desert dragons'.[9]  At first it was not understood what they were for or why they had been created.  In the century since then investigators have discovered that these extended stone structures are spread all the way across northern Africa (including along the Nile) and on into Asia from Jordan and Syria and as far as the Tibetan plateau.   A good resource for investigating them is the web page of The Global Kites Project.  The GKP is a research initiative which is funded and supported by the French Research Agency.  It maintains an online database, accessible through interactive maps, of known kites both in the Near East and in North Africa.  Currently the DB has records of 6000+ kites.[10]

We should look at these 'kites' in a little more detail.  Here is a drawing of such a kite from Armenia:

Kite K-10 from Armenia.
https://www.globalkites.fr/methods

This is kite K-10 from Armenia.[11]  All the important features are shown here.  The trap starts at the upper left-center at the wide opening of the 'rays' which lead the game to the closed corral at the lower right.  Once the gazelle squeeze through the narrow opening they are within range of the shooting  positions indicated by the small circles on the border.

The difference between community killing and solitary hunting is that community hunting might produce thousands of pounds of meat at the same time.    This gives rise to another tell-tale sign of mass animal-harvest: the existence in the surrounding landscape of facilities required for butchering and processing the meat.   Maria Zedeño and her team, writing in the context of bison processing in conjunction with dead falls for bison in southern Alberta (formerly Blackfoot territory), says "Test pits and areal excavations confirmed that these clusters corresponded to living quarters as well as discrete, stratified processing areas, each with evidence of quartering, marrow extraction, bone crushing, boiling, and meat roasting."[12]  In the consequent elaboration of structures associated with kites, falls, and traps Ms. Zedeño suggests that emerging socio-political complexity is visible in the enormous landscape-engineering projects undertaken for the creation of (ritual) wealth among restricted sectors in the group - all originating with bison falls.

An infusion of high-quality animal protein can make a profound difference in a prehistoric society.  As a result hunting, single and communal, was a highly regarded activity.  In this post I have looked at large-scale animal kills that are carried out communally.  This does not exhaust the repertoire of hunting techniques.  When the topography makes it possible drive lines can be done away with entirely.  In my next post I want to look at some examples of game-drive systems based on defiles and valleys.

Next Time: Game drive systems based on valleys or defiles.

Footnotes

[1] And not just land animals.  Nicholas Purcell describes fishermen using constrained spaces in order to maximize their catch: "Since the routes of the shoals are far from predictable, places where their movements are topographically constrained (such as straits like Messina ... *Hellespont, or lagoons and their entries) are of obvious importance."  In Oxford Classical Dictionary (Hornblower and Spawforth [2012:4]), s.v. 'fishing'.

[2]  Masseti [2003] 56 explains that introducing game animals (e.g. goat, deer, rabbit) into otherwise barren lands, such as islands, is an important part of making these areas productive. The creation of hunting 'parks' is just as important for these areas as introduction of agriculture is for other, more fertile, areas. Introduced animals manage themselves and can be drawn upon by hunters as the need arises. Some species, such as the brown hare and the wild goat, best adapted to the particular environmental conditions of small and barren islands were brought by sailors and released in order to breed and provide a store of fresh meat that would be readily available for the passengers of ships.  "Several Greek islands, such as Youra, Antimilos, Crete, and the Italian islet of Montecristo (northern Tyrrhenian sea), are still inhabited today by populations of wild goats, which feature the morphological patterns of C. aegagrus ..." and "There is arch. evidence for the introduction of the goat C. aegagrus, on such Aegean islands as Crete and Ioura (N. Sporades), from the aceramic Neolithic or the Mesolithic. The date of goat bone found on Ioura was 7360 +/- 50 BP.  " ... the introduction of C. aegagrus on Aegean islands such as Crete and Youra (northern Sporades) dates from the pre-pottery Neolithic or Mesolithic ... "  Masseti [2003] 57.

It may be this that Homer is getting at when he describes the landscape around the Cyclops' island (in Od. ix):

129 " ..., a level island stretches flat across the harbor,
not close inshore to the cyclops' coast, not too far out,
thick with woods where the wild goats breed by hundreds.
No trampling of men to start them from their lairs,
No hunters ... ever raid their haven."

137 "- the island just feeds droves of bleating goats."

The introduction of fallow deer (Dama dama) is specifically mentioned in connection with islands in the eastern Mediterranean basin such as Aghios Petros (in the Sporades and off-shore to Kira Panagia), Saliagos (between Paros and Antiparos), Rhodes, and Crete. This was done specifically for breeding and providing a supply of meat. Masseti et al. [2008] 843.

[3] "Long stone walls meander across the landscape or run for kilometres towards often highly elaborate enclosures designed to trap herds of wild animals, primarily gazelle. This technique is one that occurs in many and diverse forms across the world in places where large herds of animals congregate or migrate." Betts and van Pelt [2021], 26-7.  Fletcher explains that large structures made of low stone walls were used to guide, trap, and kill migrating gazelle in the Syrian desert in Fletcher [2011] pos. 1312.

[4] Brochier et al. [2014] 28 noticed such hidden corrals in more than 80% of such traps that they studied on Mt. Aragats in Armenia. "The slope break at the entrance to the enclosure, often mentioned in the literature, is frequently found in the Aragats kites (...); this serves to mask the presence of the enclosure for the animals driven between the antennae before they enter it."  And in Fletcher [2011] pos. 1325: "The gazelle traps consist of lines of stones sometimes extending several kilometres, ... , then converging and terminating, sometimes over a slight rise so that approaching herds could not see what awaited them, in roughly circular stone walled corrals off which smaller pens opened." (emphasis mine)

[5] For gazelle trapping using game-drive systems in Tibet see Huber [2005]; Fox and Dorji [2006].

[6] Benedict [2005] 427.  "Continuous drive walls can be as much as a kilometer long and up to a meter high ... An experiment conducted by Cassells (2000) suggests that 10 hunters could build such a wall in about 2.75 h — provided loose rocks were available everywhere along its course, and that hunters in an oxygen-poor environment could sustain the short-term effort put forth by Cassells's field crew."

[7] The Blackfoot would build game-drive systems of converging drive line walls which were built of small rock piles - usually about 3-5 m. apart.  "Simple funnels (fig. 4B) consist of two main drive lines built of small rock piles placed equidistantly from one another, usually 3–5 m apart; ... ".  Zedeño et al. [2014] 31. 

[8] Huber [2005] 12.  The 'stupidity' of these animals is often remarked.   Stefánsson is quoted in Benedict [2005] 432:  ' "It seems absurd," wrote Stefánsson (1921, p. 402), "that two stones, one on top of the other, reaching an elevation of only a foot, should be feared as much by the caribou as actual persons but that appears to be the fact."   Huber does not quite say but I would speculate that these ungulates are instinctively aware that danger of ankle injury is greater on rocky ground and so they tend to edge away from stones.

[9] Fletcher [2011] pos. 1310-15.

[10] The GKP interactive map is here.  In addition to their excellent database the GKP also conducts field work sites in Jordan, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, and Armenia.  The site photographs are invaluable and there is a bibliography.  The reader should keep in mind that the database is only partial.  The GKP does not seem to track Tibetan kites nor any of the hundreds of such sites in North or South America.  The total number of such structures in all parts of the world should exceed 10,000.  There are some draw-backs to their online implementation.  There is no way to look up a kite by name.  One must drill-down from the map to the specific kite you may wish to know about (if you even know that it exists) and then click on the 'details' button.

[11] For more on the use of kites for gazelle-trapping in Armenia see Barge et al. [2021].

[12]  Zedeño et al. [2014] 41.  See the map of the Kutoyis Complex on p. 37.

Bibliography

Barge et al [2021] : Barge, Olivier with Jacques Elie Brochier, Jwana Chahoud, C. Chataigner. 'Hunting with kites in Armenia'.  In Betts and van Pelt [2021], pp. 105-126. 2021.

Benedict [2005] : Benedict, James B., 'Tundra Game Drives: an Arctic-Alpine Comparison', Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research (37:4) 425-434. 2005.  Online here.

Betts and van Pelt [2021] : Betts, Alison and W. Paul van Pelt. The Gazelle's Dream; Game Drives of the Old and New Worlds. Sydney University Press. Sydney, Australia. 2021. ISBN: 9781743327593.

Brochier et al. [2014] : Brochier, Jacques Élie with Olivier Barge, Christine Chataigner, Marie-Laure Chambrade, Arkadi Karakhanyan, Iren Kalantaryan, Frédéric Magnin. 'Kites on the margins. The Aragats kites in Armenia', Paléorient (40:1), pp. 25-53. 2014.  Online here.

Fletcher [2011] : Fletcher, John. Gardens of Earthly Delight: The History of Deer Parks. Windgather Press. Kindle Edition. 2011.

Fox and Dorji [2006] : Fox, Joseph L. and Tsechoe Dorji. 'Traditional Hunting of Tibetan Antelope, Its Relation to Antelope Migration, and Its Rapid Transformation in the Western Chang Tang Nature Reserve', Arctic Antarctic and Alpine Research (41:2) 204-211. 2009.  Online here.

Hornblower and Spawforth [2012] :  Hornblower, Simon and Anthony Spawforth (edd.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary⁴, Oxford University Press. Oxford, United Kingdom.  2012.

Huber [2005] : Huber, Toni. 'Antelope hunting in northern Tibet: cultural adaptations to wildlife behaviour', Wildlife and plants in traditional and modern Tibet: conceptions, exploitation and conservation. Memorie della Società Italiana di Scienze Naturali e del Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano, Italy, (33:1) pp. 5-17. 2005.
Online here.

 Massetti [2003] : Massetti, Marco. 'Holocene endemic and non endemic mammals of the Aegean islands', pp. 53-63 in British School at Athens Studies, Vol. 9: Zooarchaeology in Greece: Recent Advances. 2003.  Online here.

Masseti et al. [2008] : Masseti, Marco with Elena Pecchioli and Cristiano Vernesi, 'Phylogeography of the last surviving populations of Rhodian and Anatolian fallow deer (Dama dama dama L., 1758)', pp. 835-844 in Biological Journal of the Linnean Society (93), 2008. Online here.

Stefánsson [1921] : Stefánsson, V., The Friendly Arctic. The Story of Five Years in Polar Regions. New York: The Macmillan Company.  1921.  ASIN ‏ : ‎ B099MJ2ZN4.

Zedeño et al. [2014] : Zedeño, Maria Nieves with Jesse A. M. Ballenger and John R. Murray. 'Landscape Engineering and Organizational Complexity among Late Prehistoric Bison Hunters of the Northwestern Plains', Current Anthropology, (55:1), pp. 23-58 . 2014. Online here.