---
title: "A 54.5-Metre Stone Monument in the Sahara Finally Gets a Date: 4,400 Years"
description: "Two radiocarbon dates on bone mineral give the first direct chronology for a Saharan monument type long dated only by comparison"
author: "Luis Goa"
published: 2026-10-20T22:21:12Z
modified: 2026-10-21T01:33:18Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/a-54-5-metre-stone-monument-in-the-sahara-finally-gets-a-dat-a08ef6
language: en
tags: ["archaeology", "sahara", "burial", "monument", "radiocarbon", "world"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# A 54.5-Metre Stone Monument in the Sahara Finally Gets a Date: 4,400 Years

*Two radiocarbon dates on bone mineral give the first direct chronology for a Saharan monument type long dated only by comparison*

By Luis Goa · October 20, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/a-54-5-metre-stone-monument-in-the-sahara-finally-gets-a-dat-a08ef6

## In brief

- Archaeologists dated a burial inside a 54.5-metre stone monument in Western Sahara to 4,417–4,100 years ago
- It is the first direct radiocarbon date for an “antennae tumulus,” a monument type previously dated only by comparison
- The mound measures 12.5 by 10 metres; two stone rows extend east, oriented 102 degrees from north
- A 2018 dating attempt failed for lack of collagen; 2025 bone-mineral dating succeeded on two samples
- The single adult burial held only four ostrich-eggshell beads; a rock-art site with 2,068 figures lies nearby

A single undisturbed skeleton, radiocarbon-dated to between 4,417 and 4,100 years ago, has done something no amount of mapping had managed: fixed an age on one of the Sahara’s stranger grave types, the antennae tumulus. The burial sat under an oval mound at the western end of a 54.5-metre limestone structure at Wadi Lawash el Telli, in the Western Sahara, beneath an outer skin of slabs that had never been reopened. Calibrated, the two dates put the burial at roughly 2467 to 2150 BCE, overlapping the end of the pyramid-building Old Kingdom in Egypt, 4,000 kilometres to the east.

The find is described in a paper in *African Archaeological Review* by Joaquim Soler of the Catalan Institute for Cultural Heritage Research and colleagues, [as reported by Arkeonews](https://arkeonews.net/mysterious-54-meter-long-stone-monument-discovered-in-western-sahara-reveals-4400-year-old-burial/). An antennae tumulus is a burial mound with two long, narrow rows of stone extending outward from it, giving the whole structure the silhouette that names it. Similar shapes turn up from southern Morocco to Libya, Niger and Mali, but nobody had an absolute date for one until now; every previous estimate for the type came from comparing its shape and position in a relative sequence against other, equally undated, monuments. The [full paper](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10437-026-09666-8) is paywalled, so the figures below come from Arkeonews’s account of it.

![Two long rows of upright stones lead toward a low circular stone mound across a barren desert, with distant mountains and a rust-colored sun.](https://rews.cc/img/0d39abd32dad14cec474185865054833bcfa320d.webp)

## How a small group builds 54 metres of stone

The monument has two parts. An oval mound at the western end measures 12.5 by 10 metres and rises no more than 3 metres, built from Devonian limestone slabs and blocks set directly on the gravel surface with no mortar. From that mound, two stone rows run east for most of the remaining length, oriented 102 degrees from true north — close to due east, with a slight southward tilt. Researchers who study similarly oriented Saharan monuments have floated an astronomical function for the alignment; Soler’s team is explicit that nothing at Lawash el Telli demonstrates one. The construction method itself argues against a large workforce: dry-stacked slabs with no dressing or mortar is work a handful of people could finish without specialised tools.

Set against the wider catalogue of Saharan antenna tombs, from the Tassili n’Ajjer and Hoggar massifs down through Libya, Niger, Mali and Mauritania, the shortest known examples run to about 10 metres and the longest to roughly 600 metres, [according to a survey of pre-Islamic Saharan burial monuments](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Islamic_burial_monuments_in_the_Sahara). At 54.5 metres, Lawash el Telli sits toward the short end of that range, an order of magnitude below the largest.

**Lawash el Telli among Saharan antenna tombs** Length of antenna/V-shaped tomb monuments, metres

|  | Length (m) |
| --- | --- |
| Shortest known example | 10 |
| Lawash el Telli | 54.5 |
| Longest known example | 600 |

Source: [Survey of pre-Islamic Saharan burial monuments](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Islamic_burial_monuments_in_the_Sahara)

## Why it took until 2025 to get a date

Dating almost didn’t happen at all. Bone collagen is the usual target for radiocarbon dating human remains, because it survives well and resists contamination, but the bones from Lawash el Telli had too little collagen left; a first attempt in 2018 failed outright. In 2025 the team switched to the bone’s mineral fraction — the bioapatite — and ran two samples. Both landed in the same range, 4,417 to 4,100 calibrated years before present, which is the closest thing archaeology has to independent confirmation when the sample size is two.

That result has to be read against earlier, cruder chronologies for the same monument class. A field synthesis of Western Saharan funerary monuments compiled from surveys run between 2002 and 2009 put V-shaped antenna monuments generally somewhere across a 5,400-to-3,000-year-before-present span, [based on comparative dating across multiple sites](https://www.academia.edu/8140237/The_archaeology_of_Western_Sahara_results_of_environmental_and_archaeological_reconnaissance), a 2,400-year window built from typology rather than direct measurement on any one structure. The new dates sit inside that window but land closer to its older boundary — and earlier than the roughly 2200 BCE starting point that broader Saharan antenna-tomb chronologies, built from monuments as far away as the Hoggar and Fezzan, generally assume. Whether that reflects a genuinely earlier regional tradition in the Atlantic Sahara, or just the fact that nobody had bothered to date one directly before, is exactly the kind of question one dated burial cannot settle on its own.

## A lot of stone for very little grave

The skeleton belonged to one adult, 25 to 35 years old at death by dental wear; the sex could not be determined because the bone was too poorly preserved. The body lay on its back along a north–south line, head to the south, legs folded to one side. Nothing suggested the grave had been reopened or reused. The only objects recovered were four small ostrich-eggshell beads, probably from a personal ornament — no pottery, no tools, nothing that identifies which regional culture the person belonged to. Fifty-four metres of dry-stacked limestone for one body and four beads is a lopsided ratio of labour to grave goods, and it argues that whatever status or meaning the monument encoded, it was built into the structure itself rather than into what was buried with the dead.

![Four pale, hole-pierced stone discs rest among gravel beneath large, textured boulders in a black, cream, and rust-colored illustration.](https://rews.cc/img/fe012bad737dec27142e1d21a91d52bc1daa1756.webp)

The dating also lets the researchers place antennae tumuli alongside crescent-shaped tombs, another Saharan funerary form, showing the two traditions were in use at overlapping times rather than one simply replacing the other — a comparison that was impossible to make rigorously while neither type had a secure absolute date.

Less than a kilometre from the tomb lies part of the Sluguilla Lawash rock-art complex — the same wadi, spelled slightly differently in different academic traditions as Lawash or Laauach el Telli. Soler’s team counts 2,068 engraved figures across roughly 27 kilometres of outcrop there. Earlier academic surveys of the same complex describe it running more than 30 to 35 kilometres end to end, [in work on its engravings’ Tazina style](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Sluguilla-Lawash-,-an-open-air-site-with-Rock-Art-Salam%C3%A9/bb53d80439a34a22ccaebfc60d13ab20cca78180) — a gap in extent that most likely reflects decades of staggered survey work, first logged in the 1970s, halted by war until the late 1990s, and still being re-walked. The researchers are careful not to connect the engravers to the people who built the tomb; proximity is not provenance.

One dated burial establishes that at least one antennae tumulus held a funeral and fixes when. It does not establish that every antennae tumulus in the Western Sahara, or the much larger catalogue of similar structures scattered from Mauritania to Libya, dates anywhere near 2400 to 2100 BCE. The next number worth watching is how many more of these get bioapatite dates rather than typological guesses, and whether they cluster near this one or scatter across the 2,400-year range the old comparative chronology allowed for.

## See also

- [280 ancient stone burial monuments found in Sudan reveal lost cattle-herding culture](https://archaeologymag.com/2026/05/280-ancient-stone-circles-found-in-sudan/) — archaeologymag.com · A comparably large, recently surveyed set of undated Saharan stone funerary monuments
- [Cattle without herdsmen: animal and human beings in the rock art of the Western Sahara](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284360287_Cattle_without_herdsmen_Animal_and_human_beings_in_the_prehistoric_rock_art_of_the_Western_Sahara) — researchgate.net · Academic study of the fauna engraved at Sluguilla Lawash and nearby sites
- [Atbai Enclosure Burials: monumentalism in the mid-Holocene Nubian desert](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10437-026-09654-y) — link.springer.com · Same journal's parallel study of mass Saharan stone funerary monuments, in Sudan