Israel’s strange Wheel of Ghosts, first discovered in 1968, turns out not to be so unusual after all, as new research combining remote sensing and AI now confirms the presence of many similar sites in the region.
Situated in the Golan Heights and composed of 40,000 tons of rock, archaeologists estimate the structure to date back between 3,500 and 6,500 years. Commonly referred to as the “Stonehenge of the East,” the site’s official name is Rujm el-Hiri, and it is cast in a decidedly new light in a recent paper published in PLOS One, revealing many similar structures.
Interpreting the Wheel of Ghosts
Existing interpretations have diverged in their explanations of what the Wheel of Ghosts meant to the people who built it. Those explanations run the gamut of what is generally assumed of these mysterious ancient sites: a ceremonial space, a burial mound, or an astronomical observatory.
However, these interpretations all relied on a major assumption that has proven false: that the Wheel of Ghosts is unique to the area.
That basic assumption has now been turned on its head by an international multidisciplinary team of physicists and archaeologists. Their work was rooted in remote sensing, a broad category of tools that have allowed archaeologists to view areas at broad scales, and even image beneath the ground. While such technologies have long existed, their increased adoption among archaeologists has led to major discoveries in the last two decades.
The Satellite View
Data for the research came from archives containing multiple satellite imagery platforms, including Google Earth Pro and CNES/Airbus. These archives held two decades of imagery captured between 2004 and 2024, providing multiple observations of the same regions over the years. Processing those images and then performing a comparative analysis helped the team to uncover these new sites.
Through AI processing, obscuring features like shadows and seasonal vegetation were mitigated, revealing features otherwise impossible to discern. These included signs of ancient human intervention, along with other notable landscape features, which were typically obscured. The team noted that this is a major boon to archaeology, alleviating the need for expensive, time-consuming expeditions to regions that may contain nothing of interest.
Uncovering Further Wheel of Ghosts-Like Sites
During their research, the team was shocked to find 28 sites resembling the Wheel of Ghosts, all of which had remained hidden in the area. These large, round structures shared many of the characteristics with Rujm El-Hiri and were all situated within a tight 16-mile radius of the site.
Amid the new discoveries, the Wheel of Ghosts remains singular in terms of its quality. Other sites were smaller, less elaborate, and more heavily degraded. This is likely why they remained undetected for almost six decades after the Wheel of Ghosts was first identified by modern archaeologists.
One of the primary impediments to clearly understanding the original site and these additional newly discovered structures is the broad time range archaeologists attribute to the original’s construction. This makes it difficult to determine exactly which group of people inhabited the area at the time, further clouding what these structures may have been intended for.
Intriguingly, while there seems to be a clear group of similar structures in this region, sites farther away in Galilee and Lebanon also resemble the Wheel of Ghosts in the new research. Tying together all of these sites, both near and far, will now require extensive on-the-ground research to determine if they were all occupied by a single culture.
The paper, “Reassessing Rujm El-Hiri: Aerial Imagery and Stone Circles in the Proto-Historic Southern Levant,” appeared in PLOS One on March 18, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.