Around me were more than 30 dwellings and tombs, and this was only a small fraction of the remains here. I tried to imagine the landscape as it might have been thousands of years ago: lush, green and full of people as they noisily moved about, herding goats and shouting to each other. “The climate and inert landscape of Saudi Arabia means that most of the archeology is pretty well preserved on the surface from 5,000 to 8,000 years ago. So exactly what you see is the way it was all that time ago,” McMahon said, explaining this understanding. more about the lives of these early peoples could also shed light on how the large, dense settlements of Hegra and Dedan developed and how cultural and technological changes in the region, such as irrigation, metallurgy, and written texts, arose in following millennia. “The cultural changes that took place after the Neolithic are huge, but we don’t know much about how those changes happened,” he said. However, even in the hands of such experienced archaeologists, an AlUla discovery remained unexplained. Covering an area of 300,000 square kilometers and built in a fairly consistent pattern, there are 1,600 monumental rectangular stone structures that also date to the Neolithic period. Originally called “gates” because of their appearance from the air, the structures were later renamed “mustatil”, which translates to “rectangle” in Arabic.
