Archaeologists have found a new monumental structure buried under the sand of Petra using satellite and drone images.

The massive man-made stone platform might have been used for ceremonial purposes because it was fronted on one side by columns and a monumental staircase, said Christopher A. Tuttle, executive director of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.

Only excavations would be able to shed more light on its original use, but no digs are planned for now, he said.

The monument has roughly the length and twice the breadth of an Olympic swimming pool and is located just 800 meters south of Petra, the main city in southwest Jordan. Pottery found near the monument structure suggests the structure could be more than 2,150 years old.

“Petra is an outstanding site to test new survey technologies,” wrote archaeologists Sarah Parcak and Christopher Tuttle in areport titled Hiding in Plain Sight.

“This monumental platform has no parallels at Petra or in its hinterlands at present,” the researchers wrote, noting that the structure, strangely, is near the city center but “hidden” and hard to reach.

“To my knowledge, we don’t have anything quite like this at Petra,” said Christopher Tuttle, an archaeologist who has worked at Petra for about 15 years and a co-author of the paper.

“I knew something was there and other archaeologists – who have worked in Petra for the last, God knows, 100 years at least – I know at least one other had noticed something there,” he said adding that nobody paid attention to the structure’s sides, because they resembled terrace walls common to the city, The Guardian mentions.