Stone Circle in Southern Algeria

G'day everyone!

I found this stone circle tonight while doing my usual scouting of the Sahara. So I went to find someone who could tell me what it is.. and here I am!
Around the structure in question is dark rock and salt sediment(Assuming) of an ancient river.

What is this stone circle?
25.1995601, 5.7288226

Just a quick edit:

The structure is roughly 60 meters in length and 48 meters in width.

That's a really interesting find, SonOfHairyMan. There are no Google Earth Community placemarks in the area, and although the imagery is very clear, there is no historical imagery to compare. Often a stone ring in a desert area suggests a livestock enclosure, but that structure is very complex, unlike any pen I've ever seen. From the Borders and Labels Layer, I'm assuming that the nearby volcanic necks are the Ahaggar Mountains. Since the salt trade is famous in the Sahara I wondered if the structures might have something to do with salt harvesting, although if they do, I can't for the life of me see what. I did find this reference which seems to link the Ahaggar region and salt:

Salt of the Desert Sun: A History of Salt Production and Trade in the ...
By Paul E. Lovejoy

Incidentally, when you share a location in this forum, most of us appreciate the use of a placemark, which not only defines the place, but the angle and elevation from which you are viewing it, and can include a dated historical image. Guidance for making a placemark can be found here in this forum:

googleearthcommunity.proboards.com/post/3703/thread

Attachments:

SonOfHairymans Dilemma.kmz (908 B)

Isolated and remote, appears to be very old, no indication of recent activity or visitation, no apparent access, one off, doesn't appear to be anything else like it in the area.


It is indeed very interesting. 

Here is an article that may explain this phenomenon > ANCIENT KRAAL-LIKE STONE CIRCLES IN SOUTHERN ALGERIA

Good find SonofHairyMan! A poster named KenGrok did some amazing investigations of Neolithic Monuments of the Sahara HERE in the now-archived Old Google Earth Community. He did not mark your specific location but marked many more like it. 

I also copied his placemarks to the new forum HERE and HERE.

Yves Gauthier: "Pre-Islamic Dry-Stone Monuments of the Central and Western Sahara".

Saharan dry-stone monuments are important cultural markers: not only do they highlight the boundaries of the areas occupied by different prehistoric populations, but they also reveal information about the rites and beliefs of Holocene Saharan populations. As climate deteriorated in the Middle Holocene, ways of life changed, with indirect impacts on the architecture of the monuments and on the way they were oriented. Tens of thousands of recorded monuments, of various types, allow us to understand what the orientation rules were and how they changed with location. Data compiled for the eleven types of monuments reveal that many monuments of the central Sahara and Tibesti were probably aligned toward the rising sun or moon, that three types of the Atlantic Sahara show instead a random distribution, and that monuments with a pan-Saharan distribution have a complex orientation pattern. A correlation or orientation with key landscape features is likely for three monument types, coexisting with criteria based on lunisolar alignment.

link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4614-6141-8_102