Week of July 20: 1,600 Mustatils Found in Saudi Arabia, Pompeii Shanty Towns, and More
Over 1,600 mustatils dating to 5,300–5,000 BC have been documented across northern Saudi Arabia, predating Stonehenge and the pyramids of Giza. Excavations at Pompeii’s Insula Meridionalis reveal that the city remained inhabited by shanty-town dwellers well after the 79 CE eruption, until a 472 CE eruption of Vesuvius displaced its residents. Meanwhile, a revised Xitle eruption chronology undermines the Cuicuilco refugee theory of Teotihuacan’s origins, and Hoq Cave on Socotra preserves roughly 200 multilingual inscriptions spanning the 1st century BC to the 6th century AD.
Dating & Chronology
This revised chronology carries major implications for the origins of Teotihuacan. Under the old timeline, the eruption neatly explained Teotihuacan’s population surge as a wave of refugees from Cuicuilco, which was buried under basaltic lava and ashfall. But because Teotihuacan’s principal monuments were already established by ~100 BCE with major construction continuing until ~250 CE, the city was substantially built before Cuicuilco was destroyed, undermining the refugee-driven founding narrative [V1].
The redating itself is not without dispute. Two competing clusters of radiocarbon dates persist in the literature—one near ~50 CE and a younger cluster near ~280 CE—producing a long-standing controversy that the new study has not fully resolved [1]. Archaeomagnetic analysis of the Xitle lava flows produced a notably older date (~2086 cal yr BP) that diverges from the ~1670 BP radiocarbon consensus, illustrating the methodological tensions at play. Despite this, the older refugee hypothesis remains entrenched in some institutional and governmental accounts, meaning the scholarly consensus has shifted faster than public-facing narratives.
Architecture & Monuments
Over 1,600 mustatils — monumental stone structures scattered across northern Saudi Arabia — represent one of the most surprising Neolithic discoveries of recent decades, with their main building phase dating to approximately 5,300–5,000 BC, making them older than both Stonehenge and the pyramids of Giza [V2]. Named after the Arabic word for “rectangle,” these structures consist of long stone corridors with low walls leading to a chamber or upright stone at one end, and they range dramatically in scale from roughly 20 meters to over 600 meters in length — a striking 30:1 size ratio. The sheer number recorded far exceeds that of most known Neolithic and megalithic traditions, implying a substantial organized labor capacity across the region.
Excavations reveal that mustatil chambers held cattle, sheep, and goat skulls and horns, with one structure preserving approximately 260 faunal fragments clustered around a single upright stone identified as a betil, or sacred standing stone [V2]. Archaeologists interpret the monuments as ritual or shrine sites tied to a herding lifestyle, used over generations for prayers concerning rain, fertility, and livestock health. The two-component architectural layout of corridor and terminal chamber is considered structurally significant for load distribution and orientation, while the concentration of faunal remains at the betil confirms that each chamber served as a deliberate focal point for ritual deposition. Notably, mustatils first appeared in aerial photographs during the 1970s but were not systematically studied until around 2017, a four-decade gap that affects the completeness of the current structural record. They are distinct from the later funerary avenues of northwest Arabia, which mostly date to the 3rd millennium BC.
The structure also yielded remarkable artistic evidence: a line of three decorated stone slabs was set into one of the interior walls, supported by a backing of stones, and the focal area contained five of the six small decorated stone fragments recovered from the entire site. These fragments bore geometric imagery, with tortoise carapace scute patterns apparently forming the basis for ritual and decorative motifs that extended across the broader Natufian culture area.
Wadi Hammeh 27 itself is an open-air Early Natufian settlement located at Pella in northwestern Jordan, dated to c. 12,000–12,500 cal BC, and features an architectural array of large curvilinear stone huts spanning four sequential occupational phases.
Inscriptions & Texts
The cave documented in academic literature as Hoq Cave—though the research question’s “Hoq Cave” does not appear in any provided academic source—holds a multilingual epigraphic corpus totaling approximately 200 inscriptions, although counts vary from 215+ to 216 and “nearly 250 texts and drawings” in the 2012 study by Strauch et al., likely reflecting different counting criteria [2] [V3]. Dated from the 1st century BC to the 6th century AD, with most between the 2nd and 5th centuries, the corpus represents one of the most important epigraphic sources for investigating ancient Indian Ocean trade networks. The linguistic composition is striking: 192 inscriptions are in Indian Brahmi—roughly 96%—while the remainder includes South Arabian (11), Axomite/Ge’ez (8), Greek (3), and single examples in Gandhari, Bactrian, Palmyrene, and Aramaic, plus two undetermined. Discovered by Belgian speleologists of the Socotra Karst Project, the corpus is comprehensively edited in a 2012 international publication. Socotra’s position—approximately 380 km from the Arabian Peninsula and 232 km from the Horn of Africa—helps explain its role as an Indian Ocean crossroads, yet a striking asymmetry exists: despite the island’s appearance in Greco-Roman sources like the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, only 3 Greek inscriptions survive on site.
Ancient Art
1088-c. 1157) wrote the work at the request of Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln [3].
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (1136-1138) introduced the name ‘Giants Dance’ (Chorus Gigantum) and the legend that Merlin magically transported the stones from Mount Kildare in Ireland to the Salisbury Plain [V4]. These literary works inspired the oldest known illustration of Stonehenge, found in a second-quarter 14th-century manuscript of the Roman de Brut, which shows a giant helping Merlin erect the stones. A 1440s version of the Scala Mundi later illustrated the monument with Latin text referencing the Giants Dance of Ireland conveyed to Stonehenge by Merlin’s art.
In Brief
The Sacred Well of Santa Cristina in Sardinia is a masterwork of Nuragic engineering, featuring a tholos — a corbelled conical vault — built in concentric rings that produces a round opening at the top and a tapered, bottle-shaped chamber descending below [V5]. Each successive course of stone is set back, with the inward slant of the masonry deliberately forming a near-perfect circular opening at the apex. The subterranean chamber rises over 7 meters, framing a central opening roughly 50 centimeters deep. The masonry itself is described as opera quadrata, or ashlar stonework, attesting to an extraordinary level of precision.
The well is situated on a basaltic plateau near Paulilatino in central-western Sardinia, within a wooded park that also contains a nuragic village and the rural sanctuary of S. Cristina. Attributed to the Nuragic civilization, it served as the heart of a broader sacred precinct and was central to water cults, drawing entire communities for religious practices and pilgrimages.
La Venta, founded around 1400 BCE on a small salt dome island in the Tonala River drainage roughly 12–13 kilometers from the Gulf Coast in present-day Tabasco, Mexico, stands as the oldest known Olmec city in Mesoamerica [V6] [4]. Its planned layout and aligned monumental platforms reflect a sophisticated urban vision, while the surrounding wetland environment provided rich agricultural and marine resources that sustained the settlement. By 1150 BCE, emerging elites had begun adopting pottery styles associated with San Lorenzo, and maize farming scaled up to become the staple crop supporting the city and its hinterland.
Early research at the site emphasized monumental sculptures and finely crafted greenstone objects, and La Venta served as a major city for about 500 years before its decline. The later discovery of petroleum at the site led to the relocation of many artifacts, further complicating interpretation of the archaeological record. However, several specific quantitative claims—including the 150–200 hectare area, the 18,000 population figure, and the 13-kilometer distance from the coast—derive from a single YouTube secondary source rather than peer-reviewed excavation reports, and should therefore be treated with caution [V6].
Recent work on the Insula Meridionalis in the south of Pompeii has revealed that the city was not simply abandoned after the catastrophic 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius, but instead remained inhabited by a shanty town population well into the fifth century CE [V7]. Archaeological material corroborates that people made their homes among the partially re-emerged ruins, using a load-path construction strategy that exploited the residual structural capacity of 79 CE walls rather than clearing debris to rebuild from grade. Post-eruption occupation levels have now been identified across multiple building typologies, including a bath complex, several seaside villas, and residential insulae, indicating that the settlement was not confined to a single neighborhood. The year 472 CE, which marks the apparent terminus of continuous habitation, corresponds to a known late-antique eruption of Vesuvius, offering a specific volcanic event that may have finally displaced the remaining inhabitants.
Organized rebuilding of Pompeii’s infrastructure and public spaces never took place, and they remained buried until eighteenth-century excavations [V7]. The porous volcanic debris prevented the surrounding landscape from retaining moisture, and it took decades for the ground to consolidate and regain fertility. Multiple independent investigations across Insula Meridionalis, Insula 10 on the via di Nola, and the Insula of the Centenary (IX.8) are now yielding convergent evidence of this centuries-long reoccupation.
The Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang represents one of antiquity’s most ambitious construction projects, with approximately 700,000 workers toiling for 38 years to build a complex covering roughly 56 square kilometers — far larger than Egypt’s Valley of the Kings [V8]. Despite the emperor’s death at age 49, possibly from mercury consumed as an elixir of immortality, construction continued for two more years.
The most striking modern discovery involves remote sensing of mercury within the unexcavated tomb. Radar scanning has revealed a network of large chambers and corridors enclosed by thick walls, consistent with an underground palace rather than a simple shaft [V8]. Estimated to hold tens to possibly 100 tons of mercury, the tomb remains unexcavated due to structural complexity, preservation technology gaps, and safety risks.
Southwestern Iberia stands as one of the densest concentrations of megalithic architecture on Earth, home to the world’s oldest dolmens and thousands of prehistoric monuments. The Menga dolmen at Antequera, Spain, dated to approximately 3800–3600 BC, ranks among the largest megalithic monuments in Europe and forms the centerpiece of the UNESCO World Heritage serial property alongside the Viera Dolmen and the Tholos of El Romeral. The region’s megalithic density extends well beyond Spain: the Alto Alentejo of Portugal preserves more than one hundred dolmens, antas, and menhirs, including the Parque Megalítico dos Coureleiros [8].
The wider context of these structures reveals a dynamic, evolving landscape. The Chalcolithic Southwest Iberia cultural horizon is characterized as a tapestry of linked communities networked through trade, ritual, and marriage rather than a single centralized polity [6]. This interconnected world underwent significant demographic restructuring between the Neolithic and Late Bronze Age, with documented site counts plummeting from 176 Neolithic sites to just 27 Late Bronze Age sites [5]. Meanwhile, the very ground beneath these monuments remains active: the Iberian Peninsula is undergoing tectonic rotation driven by the ongoing interaction between the Eurasian and African plates [7], a reminder that the dramatic landscapes framing these ancient sites continue to shape them today.
When John Emmert took over as the Smithsonian’s mound exploration agent in 1885 following the death of J.W. Norris, he promptly produced one of the most sensational claims to emerge from the 1880s fieldwork in eastern Tennessee: a skeleton measuring 7‘3” from skull base to toes at a mound in Rhea County, Long Island, Tennessee, with an estimated living stature of 7‘6” [V9]. The figure should be read with caution on multiple fronts. Smithsonian archaeologist Cyrus Thomas later characterized Emmert as uneducated and dismissed him from the mound exploration program for drunkenness, while the “skull base to toes” measurement itself is methodologically problematic — omitting the cranial vault and including excess foot length — and does not correspond to any standard osteometric stature reconstruction. The community of “Long Island” is a place name in Rhea County, not an actual island, a detail easily misread by researchers unfamiliar with the region.
In the late 1960s the Bat Creek inscription was reidentified as more closely resembling Paleo-Hebrew script, and the artifact is now generally regarded as a hoax or forgery. Giant-skeleton claims were a recurring feature of 19th-century sensationalist mound exploration, and documented mound burials have not yielded individuals of the reported stature, which contextualizes the Smithsonian’s institutional skepticism toward Emmert’s work.
The mound above the predicted anomaly coordinates in the Western Cemetery at Giza is not a natural landform but rather “smarino”—spoil from early 20th-century cleanup campaigns of the nearby mastabas [V10]. Crucially, the predicted structure is interpreted as lying below the natural ground level beneath this spoil deposit, not within the spoil itself. The anomaly beneath was detected using ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), which identified an L-shaped formation and a deeper feature exhibiting high resistivity, all without excavation or ground-breaking.
The stratigraphic reality of modern dumped overburden on the Giza Plateau is independently confirmed by Lehner’s Giza Plateau Mapping Project, which describes clearing “large volumes of overburden consisting of sand and material dumped in modern times” to expose and map the compact surface beneath.
Sources
- Fragment of the mural paint of the Xitle eruption and impact on Cuicuilco …
- Foreign Sailors on Socotra: The inscriptions and drawings from the cave Hoq
- Henry of Huntingdon
- La Venta
- The Window on the (South)west: The Southwest Iberian Bronze Age from …
- Copper‑Age Voices of Southwest Iberia - DNAGENICS
- Research shows Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe rotating …
- Explore Alto Alentejo, Portugal
Videos
V1. Archaeologist Ed Barnhart — “The Real Origins of Teotihuacan?” V2. Michael Button — “We Just Found Something Incredible in the Arabian Desert” V3. The Historian’s Craft — “Probably Rome’s Two Most Distant Outposts” V4. The Prehistory Guys — “Stonehenge in Art & Writing Before the 20th Century” V5. Earth Explorer — “The Impossible Precision of The Well of Santa Cristina: Why This Italian Well Matches Peru” V6. Ancient Americas — “The Olmec Golden Age” V7. toldinstone — “Why Wasn’t Pompeii Rebuilt After the Eruption?” V8. Michael Button — “Why Won’t Archaeologists Open History’s Biggest Tomb?” V9. DeDunking — “The Gigantic Smithsonian Giant Bone Debacle #archaeology #realarchaeology #conspiracy” V10. The Cosmic Summit — “Radar Tomography Shows a Second Sphinx at Giza”
Originally published on Ancient Nerds — explore 750,000+ archaeological sites on our interactive 3D globe.