Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—Researchers report evidence of large-scale prehistoric hunting structures, likely built before the Bronze Age, in the Adriatic hinterland. Dimitrij Mlekuž Vrhovnik and Tomaž Fabec used airborne laser scanning to identify four prehistoric hunting structures on Europe’s Karst Plateau. The structures—comparable to the “desert kites” of arid Southwest Asia and North Africa—consisted of massive, dry-stone walls designed to guide and corral animal prey. The largest structure extended several kilometers, with converging walls that funneled into a natural cliff edge roughly 10 meters across, where a stone-built enclosure created a square pit that functioned as the final trap. Excavations at the walls recovered charcoal fragments, a flint bladelet, and burnt clay, with radiocarbon dates ranging from the Late Bronze Age to the Roman Period—materials deposited long after the structures had gone out of use. The authors suggest that the traps themselves were constructed previously, in the Neolithic or Mesolithic Period, and that the largest trap would have required more than 5,000 person-hours of coordinated labor. According to the authors, the monumental structures reveal that large-scale communal hunting strategies were present in prehistoric Europe.
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LiDAR image of a prehistoric hunting trap on the Karst Plateau, highlighting the structure’s scale and integration into the landscape. Image credit: Dimitrij Mlekuž Vrhovnik.
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Article Source: PNAS news release
*Prehistoric hunting megastructures in the Adriatic hinterland, 10/14,2025, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.251190812
