Skip To Content

Where To Stream NOVA Season 52 Episode 17

Ancient Desert Death Trap

Across the Middle East lie thousands of enigmatic stone megastructures whose shape, when seen from the air, looks like giant kites. The oldest were built around 7,000 B.C., predating the earliest Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge by several thousand years. Since their discovery in the 1920s, these "desert kites" have posed a stubborn mystery: Who designed them, and why were they built? How did prehistoric people, before the invention of writing, draw detailed scale models without compasses, hot...