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Discovered in Rajasthan, are these giant lines the result of erosion or the work of men?

2021-06-16T21:17:34.977Z


ARCHEOLOGY - A French researcher thinks he has identified, thanks to Google Earth, a vast set of geoglyphs carved in the 19th century in the Indian desert of Thar.


It would be the largest human creation ever documented in India.

Going unnoticed for several centuries, could a set of straight lines and spiral patterns traced at several points in the great Thar Desert in Rajasthan have been traced by the hand of man?

Ephemeral creations doomed to disappear in the Indian sands, these mysterious figures date from the beginning of the British colonial era, believes Carlo Oetheimer, a French researcher from Luriecq (Loire) who identified these

"structures"

after having inspected, with his son, a desert area of ​​nearly 280 km2 in western Rajasthan.

To carry out this vast archaeological prospecting which, a century ago, would have required the sending of a considerable scientific expedition, the Ligérien did not move from France: armed with high resolution satellite images, he did not leave France. simply draw from the fund of images available to everyone on Google Earth.

An approach which has already given birth, in recent years, to as many actual discoveries as it has sparked false hopes.

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Identified in 2014 in the arid district of Jaisalmer, the various sites with mysterious layouts were the subject of a real field survey in December 2016, at the mildest time of the year. Attested on site, at the surface as at drone height, the clear lines observed for the first time by satellite imagery consist of more or less eroded furrows which, from a certain height, do indeed seem to give rise to geometric sets with patterns as regular as they are varied: an almost perfect rectangular grid in one case, a dune shape in another, or even a series of interlacings woven of serpentine lines. Sometimes quite coherent in appearance, these different sets form however, and just as frequently,simple hatching in Indian sands, without recalling any particular pattern. Aren't the geoglyphs of the Rajasthan desert rather natural structures, shaped by winds rather than by man?

  • 1/3 - The various

    “geoglyphs”

    identified in Rajasthan, as well as the position of the various Hindu stelae in the region.

    Yohann Oetheimer

  • 2/3 - Detail of the monumental double geoglyph.

    Yohann Oetheimer

  • 3/3 - Ground view of the tracks.

    Yohann Oetheimer

A hypothesis to be handled

"with caution"

Carlo Oetheimer is convinced of this: at least some of these figures could well have been drawn by the hands of local inhabitants, or at least their ancestors. The monumental size of the two most promising figures is

"particularly impressive and must have mobilized a complex reflection in their design and realization"

, argues the independent researcher in an article to be published in September in the scientific journal

Archaeological Research in Asia

.

“Knowledge of mathematics and planimetry were necessarily used to produce these figures”

. By taking as a point of reference the level of erosion of these furrows as well as the monolithic Hindu stelae present in the region, around these

"Geoglyphs",

the researcher suggests seeing in this set traces dating from the nineteenth century.

According to him, these are

“unique geoglyphs”

of a sacred nature,

“closely linked to their geographical and cultural context”

, of which the monoliths built at the same time form part.

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Arguments that struggle to convince Amal Kar, a former researcher at the Central Arid Zone Research Institute. A specialist in the Thar Desert, which he has been studying for about fifty years, the Indian scientist based in Jodhpur believes that the furrows discovered by the French are simple natural formations. And for good reason: the area studied by Carlo Oetheimer is located on rather specific soils, "

above layers of sandstone and iron shale". "The extreme aridity and high temperature cause a slow geochemical translocation of minerals for centuries (...), which leads to the gradual formation of alternating bands of concentrations of harder and softer minerals

," he said. explained in an interview with Indian daily

The Hindu

. Over time, the areas containing softer materials erode away, leaving the more solid areas on the surface, which produces fairly typical patterns of concentric or box-like shape

”. In short, these sandy grooves would not have vast geoglyphs, and quite a trivial geological phenomenon.

"The attribution of these characteristics to man must be considered with caution, if and only if any other natural explanation is defeated"

, also recalled Amal Kar. If the identification of the long lines of Rajasthan with geoglyphs of the nineteenth century does not seem to win the support of the Indian specialist, the discovery in itself of these lines is not called into question. Carlo Oetheimer now intends to return to the charge with new elements: dating samples by thermoluminescence would allow him to clarify, even to settle the hypothesis put forward, he hopes.

The case of the hypothetical monumental figures in the Thar Desert is not the first - and probably the last - that consumer satellite imagery such as Google Earth has been used by archaeologists, whether or not they are amateurs. In 2016, in particular, the announcement of the discovery by a Quebec teenager of a Mayan city had a lot of impact around the world before being battered into breach by specialists around the world. In contrast, and in a completely different context, two archaeologists also discovered new structures in the same year in the Nabataean city of Petra, Jordan. Two examples which show that in archeology as in any other science, the quality of tools is not theunique spring of discoveries and research advances.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2021-06-16

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