After announcing in February that he had unearthed almost 2000 potential archaeological sites in Saudi Arabia from his armchair, Professor David Kennedy, from the University of Western Australia, has now uncovered thousands more prehistoric man-made stone structures across the entire Arabian peninsula, stretching from northern Syria to Yemen.

Aerial archaeology transformed our understanding of north-western Europe two or three generations ago but Professor Kennedy said "that opportunity was lost in the Middle East". It's only now, thanks to Google Earth, that the areas that were previously off-limits to archaeologists are being fully understood.

"The result can - and surely will be, a radical rethinking of human settlement in the region from northern Syria to Yemen not least now in the bleak arid landscapes of the interior of 'Arabia'," Professor Kennedy said.

The finds comes after Melbourne-based La Trobe University PhD student David Thomas used Google Earth in 2008 to find hundreds of previously unknown sites in Afghanistan.

Mr Thomas, who is still waiting for his thesis to be marked, told Fairfax Media today that Google Earth archaeology was becoming a global trend particularly among younger researchers who were more receptive to new technology.

"The big advantage is you can look wherever you want ... you can't get access to the ground very easily out there [in the Middle East] and there aren't detailed aerial photographs and so Google Earth makes it so easy," said Thomas, adding that Google's tool was free whereas buying commercial satellite images or aerial photographs was very expensive and covered only small areas.

'Works of the old men'

Professor Kennedy's discoveries of thousands of stone structures in the Middle East - from ancient animal traps to stone wheels to tombs - are being compared to the Nazca Lines in southern Peru. These are the World Heritage-listed series of ancient geoglyphs that, when viewed from the air, reveal a striking array of figures including hummingbirds, lizards, spiders and monkeys.

But Professor Kennedy's finds - known by the local Bedouin as the "works of the old men" - are not all simply ancient art or spiritual/religious objects such as the Nazca Lines. The immense man-made landscape serves a more practical purpose and the structures are more impressive in a number of ways.

The Nazca Lines - a few hundred individual items - belong to a period of about 1000 to 1500 years ago and cover an area of about 500 square kilometres, while Professor Kennedy's Arabian discoveries are prehistoric - up to 9000 years old, he believes - and cover 3 million square kilometres.

Among Professor Kennedy's discoveries in the area are domestic dwellings, tens of thousands of stone burial tombs shaped strikingly like pendants and trumpets and 3000 "kites". The kites were named as such due to their shape and were in fact used as animal traps - ranging in diameter from 20 or 30 metres to 10 times that size.

"The tails are guide walls, animals would be enticed into the open mouth of the guide walls and they'd be slowly funnelled down until they found themselves in a circular enclosure of some kind, where they would be killed," said Professsor Kennedy.

Building a map of prehistoric Arabia

These stone structures - which were about a metre high at the time but are now just 50 or 60 centimetres tall - were first discovered by British Royal Air Force pilots in the 1920s but the finds were very partial and fragmented. As at 1995 there were only about 507 known "kites" in the area but Professor Kennedy has now increased this six-fold.

"What has changed now - thanks to a programme of aerial archaeology in Jordan and the growing coverage of high-resolution imagery on Google Earth and Bing, is the ability to identify these structures over immense areas of Arabia, draw them, map them and begin the task of interpretation on which specialists in the region and period can base a multi-disciplinary research project," he said.

With Google Earth, Professor Kennedy and other archaeologists are able to build a much more complete picture and discover ancient structures in areas where they would never be permitted - or physically able - to access on the ground or by using aerial photography.

Professor Kennedy bristles at the idea of being labelled an "armchair archaeologist" as he has been conducting aerial photography missions over Jordan for about 15 years and has a website with over 40,000 photographs. In fact today he was preparing to fly back to the Middle East after speaking to Fairfax Media.

But the inhospitable terrain - and often the inability to make sense of structures at ground level - makes Google Earth an essential tool. Professor Kennedy said comparing archaeological traces seen on satellite imagery with low-level aerial imagery from his annual flying programme in Jordan was especially valuable.

"The interior [of Arabia] is a huge extent of bleak and inhospitable deserts - volcanic lava fields, sand desert, waterless mountains," he said.

"Counter-intuitively, there was nevertheless extensive human activity there from early prehistoric times."

Professor Kennedy has published his findings in a new paper: Kennedy, D. L. The "Works of the Old Men" in Arabia. Remote sensing in interior Arabia, Journal of Archaeological Science, 2011.

Other Google satellite discoveries

In 2008 and 2009 other Google Maps researchers discovered rare meteorite impact craters in Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

In 2008, a West Australian man said he felt like Charles Darwin after discovering - via Google Earth - an extensive formation of fringing coral reefs just west of the Kimberley.

In 2007 Google Maps revealed an aerial image of a US nuclear-powered submarine and, separately, evidence of China's nuclear submarine capability.

In 2006 an Australian granny living in a small Canadian prairie town discovered an intriguing rock formation that looks like an iPod-wearing native American.

This reporter is on Twitter: @ashermoses