In the deserts of the Middle East are huge ancient stone circles. Their purpose is more mysterious than the superficially similar objects in northern Europe, but archaeologist David Kennedy hopes images taken from the sky will solve the puzzle. In the 1920s, a mustachioed British commander named Lionel Rees set out across the deserts of what would become Jordan. Snapping some of the earliest archaeological aerial photographs, he observed numerous immense, nearly perfect stone circles. “All three are almost exact circles, are different from anything else in the country,” he wrote in the journal Antiquity. One of the many stone circles Rees was baffled…