Rémy Crassard
Dr. Rémy Crassard is an archaeologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He participated in more than 70 archaeological expeditions, in many countries of the Middle East. He is the director of the Globalkites Project, has been teaching at universities in France and abroad, and has extensively published in international scientific journals and books. In 2017, he was appointed to the French center for archaeology and social sciences (CEFAS) in Kuwait, as permanent researcher and CEFAS Head of Archaeology.
The Archaeology of Mysterious Gigantic Structures: The “desert kites”
From the 1920s, aviators regularly spotted enigmatic gigantic stone structures from the air. With the development of open-accessed satellite imagery, the number of these structures, called ‘desert kites’, now reaches more than 6000. The desert kites were hunting mega-traps and seem to work within a complex system leading to strong landscape modification. Their dating and how they were used have been unresolved questions for many years. The “Globalkites Project” (www.globalkites.fr) is proposing an interdisciplinary approach at the crossings of archeology, ethnology, geography and biological and geological sciences. Another aspect of the project is the study of kites’ huge distribution, from Arabia to Mesopotamia, and from Armenia to Uzbekistan. These will be the discussion points of this lecture.