A 492-foot-long moon-shaped stone structure measuring 500,000 cubit feet in volume has been unearthed a few miles northwest of the Sea of Galilee in Israel. Archaeologists originally believed that it was part of a city wall, however, that no longer appears to be the case. The structure dates from between 3050 B.C.E. and 2650 B.C.E., which means that it was likely related to the ancient town of Bet Yerah.

However, given that it is 18 miles away, the structure is too far from the site of that town to have served as a defensive wall. Bet Yerah translates into English as “house of the moon god,” which gives further evidence of a relationship between the two. It should also be pointed out, however, that it is unclear that the town used the name Bet Yarah at the time of the monument’s construction.

Ido Wachtel, an Israeli doctoral student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, believes that the site served as a claim on the land rather than a defensive structure.

“The proposed interpretation for the site is that it constituted a prominent landmark in its natural landscape, serving to mark possession and to assert authority and rights over natural resources by a local rural or pastoral population,” Wachtel wrote in a presentation for the International Congress on Archaeology of the Ancient Near East.

Whatever the site was for, it is clear that it was of vital importance to the residents of the region.

“The estimation of working days invested in the construction [of] the site is between 35,000 days in the lower estimate [and] 50,000 in the higher,” Wachtel said in an email to Live Science.

The construction times translate to five months of work for 200 workers. While that may not seem like much in the modern age of skyscrapers and freeways, it would have been a considerable burden to people who devoted most of the year to agriculture.