page_title: Megaliths in the Urals
section_title: Geoglyph
hierarchical_section_title: Megaliths in the Urals / Geoglyph
caption_attribution_description: English: Stone structure of the geoglyph.
context_page_description: In recent years, many megaliths have been discovered in the Urals: dolmens, menhirs and a large megalithic cultic complex on Vera Island.
context_section_description: The discovery of a giant land art drawing of a moose or elk was made by Alexander Shestakov using satellite imagery and reported on in 2011 in the journal Antiquity. The geoglyph is located on the slopes of the Zyuratkul Mountains and has accurate contours of an animal similar to elk (54˚56'33" N 59˚11'32" E). Precisely under the contour on depth of 30 centimetres (12 in) to 40 centimetres (16 in) the stone laying 4.5 metres (15 ft) wide was unearthed. Its borders consisted of large stones, and the center was filled with small stones. Builders of the object cut off a soil layer up to virgin clay, and placed stones into this trench. 
  
  Now the stones are covered by a layer of patina and have a dark shade. But earlier they were light and were perfectly visible from the ridge, because the size of the drawing is huge. Its width is of 195 metres (640 ft), the length of 218 metres (715 ft), and the diagonal of 275 metres (902 ft). 
  It is unknown today, whether this geoglyph belongs to the period of the same megalithic culture, as megaliths of the Vera Island. Everywhere, from geoglyphs in the Nazca Lines to the Blythe geoglyphs in California and several in England it is very difficult to date them. But a very early date for this geoglyph is probable. In the period of its creation the soil layer was only 10 centimetres (3.9 in), and today it is 40 centimetres (16 in) to 50 centimetres (20 in).
  In 2012, Stanislav Grigoriev from the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of History and Archaeology has suggested that stone tools found during recent excavations show a style of Lithic reduction dating to the Neolithic or Eneolithic periods between 4000 and 2000 BCE. This suggested dating would place the construction of the 900 feet (270 m) geoglyph many centuries before that of the Nazca lines in Peru, build around 500 CE.
caption: Geoglyph on the slope of the Zyuratkul. Stone structure.
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