As reported at the BBC:
It was slaughter on a huge scale. Hundreds of migrating gazelles would be funnelled into enclosures where they could be butchered en masse.More information at the link. I also found additional photos and descriptions of the structures here and here. The "technology" is quite reminiscent of the North American "buffalo jumps" (see also here), and of the ancient fishing weirs found worldwide.
It has long been suspected that the enigmatic stone structures that dot the Syrian landscape were involved in harvesting gazelles. Built perhaps as far back as 10,000 years ago, these structures display converging pairs of low stone walls.
When British air force pilots first flew over them in the early 20th Century, they dubbed them "desert kites" because of their characteristic appearance from the air...
Drs Bar-Oz, Melinda Zeder and Frank Hole describe in PNAS the discovery of a large deposit of gazelle bones at the site of Tell Kuran, near the town of Hasseke in the Khabur Basin. This killing pit is very close to a number of desert kites and contains thousands of gazelle parts. "It is manifest that these remains are from a catastrophic hunting episode - a full herd was killed," said Dr Bar-Oz...
Whereas the limited activities of ancient hunter-gatherer societies may even have nurtured herds, preventing them from getting too big and damaging the landscape, this systematic removal of whole breeding groups would have rapidly reduced gazelle numbers in the Khabur Basin.
And with kites spread right across the Near East, with large arrays in Jordan in particular, the impact on what was once an abundant wild ungulate must have been profound.
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