A mysterious, ancient man-made stone structure in the Golan Heights that has intrigued researchers for decades is not at all unique in the region, a new study published in the prestigious journal PLOS ONE found.

Consisting of a central mound surrounded by multiple concentric rings of basalt stones, the enigmatic site is sometimes referred to as the “Stonehenge of the East” or the “Wheel of Ghosts.” The Rujm el-Hiri stone circle was first discovered in 1968 through military aerial photography.

Built between 6,500 and 3,500 years ago, the site is composed of some 40,000 tons of rocks. It has been variously interpreted as a burial monument, an astronomical observatory, a place for ceremonial gatherings, and more, largely based on what archaeologists believed was its singularity.

Recently, a multidisciplinary team of Israeli and international archaeologists and physicists was working on developing methods to use remote sensing — an umbrella of technologies that allows researchers to obtain information about objects or areas from afar — as a tool for archaeological survey.

They used high-resolution satellite imagery acquired over two decades (2004–2024) by several platforms, including Google Earth Pro and CNES/Airbus. They also combined images capturing the same areas from different sources and across the years and processed them.

The methodology enhanced visibility of landscape characteristics and traces of ancient human intervention that would otherwise be hidden by seasonal vegetation, shadows, and other obstacles. The resulting images feature clear shapes and structures that would have been invisible to the naked eye or in regular aerial images.

As they examined the results documented in the Golan area, they were surprised to identify several sites that looked remarkably similar to Rujm el-Hiri, as Michal Birkenfeld from the Department of Archaeology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev told The Times of Israel over the telephone.

“Archeological survey and field work in general are very time-consuming and costly,” Birkenfeld noted. “In this case, we have been using satellite photography and artificial intelligence to find archaeological sites without going into the field.”

“The most interesting thing to me was that during this research, we started identifying this phenomenon of large round structures with all kinds of repeating characteristics, which reminded us very much of the Rujm el-Hiri,” she said.

A central site among many?

Overall, 28 large circular structures were identified and presented in the PLOS ONE study, all within a 25-kilometer (16-mile) radius from Rujm el-Hiri.

“Rujm el-Hiri is, of course, a very well-known site, and it was always considered to be a very unique site in the area,” Birkenfeld said. “Most [of the sites we discovered] were not as elaborate and were of different sizes and levels of preservation, but they still have the same type of logic.”

“If this is the case, it also impacts the way we can interpret these sites,” Birkenfeld explained, adding that they have also found that there are similar sites further away, including in the Galilee and in Lebanon.

The question is connected to how to understand the original one at Rujm el-Hiri, which remains surrounded by enigmas.

Rujm el-Hiri’s dating has been problematic, with scholars suggesting the Chalcolithic period (45003–800 BCE), Early Bronze Age (3700–2500 BCE), or even Late Bronze Age (1500–1200 BCE).

“I believe that if we date it between 6,000 and 5,000 years ago, we are in the ballpark,” Birkenfeld said.

Given the length of that period, the archaeologist said it is difficult to assess who lived in the region and was therefore likely responsible for building the site.

“There were changes throughout time, and there has been a lot of debate, because some people thought that Rujm el-Hiri belongs to the culture of nomadic pastoralists, and some say that it is connected to the [permanent agricultural] settlements that we see nearby,” she said.

No unequivocal evidence testifying to a connection between the site and a settlement in the area has ever emerged.

Regarding its function, a 2025 paper by Birkenfeld and two of the three co-authors of the PLOS ONE paper — Olga Khabarova of the University of Luxembourg and Lev V. Eppelbaum of Tel Aviv University — already discounted the hypothesis that Rujm el-Hiri served as an observatory.

The previous study used remote sensing to show that Rujm el-Hiri’s location had shifted and rotated at an average rate of 8-15 mm per year — meaning it had moved tens of meters since its construction — and therefore the original alignment of the walls and entrances did not correspond to celestial observations, as previously thought.

Birkenfeld said the possibility she finds more persuasive is a more functional, rather than spiritual, goal, especially in light of the results of the PLOS ONE paper.

“If this is not a unique structure, I find more leverage in the idea that this was an area to get together, as for example in the phenomenon, especially common in nomadic societies, of seasonal gatherings, [where communities] otherwise spread [would meet],” she said.

Birkenfeld said more in-depth research will be needed to confirm that all the new sites indeed express the same culture. Notably, some of them appear to have been used over a long period, possibly even periodically abandoned and reused across the centuries.

Birkenfeld expressed confidence that additional work will yield at least some answers about dating and material culture, saying there is “power in numbers” to learn new information from the newly found structures that Rujm el-Hiri alone did not offer.

“What we could learn from remote sensing is form, size, and location [of the sites],” she said. “Now we need traditional archaeology so we can talk about activities and chronology. Only when we know what they did in these structures and when they did it, will we really have the entire wide plethora of information that we need to start hypothesizing on what those sites meant.”

“This paper is really just the beginning of a project rather than the end of it,” she added.

Gavriel Fiske contributed to this report.

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archaeology in Israel

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU)

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