Thanks! Also new for me.

https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=2146412866&mode...

"Interestingly, the walls of the kites are not high enough to actually block the animals. Rather, they just seem to channel herds in the right direction. Modern wildlife managers in the same region have used a similar approach by laying pipes on the ground to direct gazelles into a corral, Avner reports."

Soft control, local minima, convenience, creator intent, fatal consequences.

Or in other words, surveillance capitalism social media.

A similar concept would be used in Canada and the US by the Native Americans, although they liked to make the end of the run a cliff so the people didn't have to do the killing by hand. Such constructions were called Buffalo Jumps.

A famous one in Alberta is the Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump: https://headsmashedin.ca/

I'm not sure "constructions" are the correct word. Buffalo jumps were generally natural cliffs and the heard was chased over them. The animals were corralled towards the jump by people on foot and by lighting fires, one of the few things that would make buffalo run rather than stand their ground. (Remember, no horses at this time)

They also included a runup where stone walls were built to corral the buffalo into a narrow point so they all ran off the cliff in roughly the same place. Without the walls the herd would turn unpredictably and avoid the cliff face.

Funny how they were named by "pilots who first saw them from the air in the 1920s" and not by the people who built them.

Since they were abandoned about 4000 years ago, I'd imagine that it's quite hard to find any records of their original name...

Presumably the people who built them didn't call them "desert kites." I think it's pretty clear the author was referring to that name when pilots in the 1920s were said to have named them.

Writing and history were pretty new at the time too so we probably don't even have a record of what they were called by the people who used them if they ever wrote it down to begin with.