A 2011 study analyzing satellite imagery in Jordan identified more than 1,000 giant stone "wheels"; field archaeology later showed some were prehistoric burial or ritual structures

Picture this: an archaeologist sitting at a desk, scrolling through satellite images, when massive stone circles suddenly appear on the screen. That is roughly how this story begins. David Kennedy, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia, was reviewing satellite images of the basalt desert in Jordan. He had not expected to find thousands of unexplained patterns of stone, but that's what came up. In Kennedy's 2011 Journal of Archaeological Science study, these structures, nicknamed "wheels," turned out to be among the largest assemblages of ancient stonework documented from the air.

What are these wheels

They are not wheels as you might picture them. There is no axle and nothing moves. From above, each one looks like a circle with spokes running through the middle, like a bicycle wheel drawn out in stone. Most wheels range from 25 to 70 meters across, about the size of a football field or smaller, the study notes. More than 1,000 have been recorded to date, scattered across the lava fields of eastern Jordan, with related structures found in Syria and Saudi Arabia.


It wasn't a single discovery. The wheels themselves are just one part of a much larger network of ancient stonework across the region. The network has been named by the Bedouins living in the area "the works of the old men," because no one knew who had built it. Apart from the wheels, this network consists of other formations, such as animal traps called kites and burial trails known as pendants. Together they imply that this desert was a far busier place thousands of years ago than it now seems.

Kennedy has often compared these formations to the Nazca Lines of Peru, the famous desert drawings that can only be appreciated from the sky. This analogy makes sense: both structures are massive, both are best appreciated from above, and both were built by people with no way of seeing their own work from that vantage point. The difference lies in their size and age, with Jordanian stones being bigger and possibly much older.

Who built them and why

There was no way for researchers to guess the age of the wheels from satellite images alone. Years later, researchers from Kennedy's group of archaeologists visited a site called Wisad Pools, in Jordan's Black Desert, to examine some of these wheels on the ground.

A 2016 study in the journal Antiquity, involving members of the same research team, explains how the team used a dating technique called optically stimulated luminescence. This technique measures when the grains of sand were last exposed to the sun. This can be used to date when a structure was built or disturbed. The results provided the first solid dates ever recorded for these wheels. One structure dates back to the Late Neolithic, while the other was constructed during the transition from the Late Chalcolithic to the Early Bronze Age. That means these wheels are thousands of years old, and some may even be older than the Great Pyramid of Giza, built around 2580–2560 BCE.

The fieldwork also revealed something else of interest. The same study states that several of the wheels contained burial cairns, small piles of stones marking graves, built within their structure. This implies that some wheels were not random marks on the landscape. They may have had a ritual or funerary function, related to the way in which ancient desert populations commemorated their dead.

Why this matters

Thousands of years before satellites were around to spot their work, people were building large, deliberate, symmetrical structures in a harsh desert, without modern tools. And we only know about most of them because someone at a laptop just happened to zoom into the right map. It’s a reminder that mysteries are not usually solved quickly. While Kennedy spotted the wheels through remote sensing, it took years of actual digging and analysis for the real facts to be discovered. That is one part of archaeology: the gap between seeing something odd and figuring out what it is.

The mystery isn’t quite solved yet

Not all wheels contain a burial cairn. Not every wheel has been dated. Researchers still do not fully understand why these shapes were selected, why some feature dozens of internal spokes, or if each wheel had the same purpose. Wheel designs vary greatly from region to region, suggesting that different communities may have constructed them for different purposes, as Live Science reports. So for now, the Jordan wheels remain part solved mystery, part open question. And that’s exactly why archaeologists keep coming back to them.