But the convergence of evidence — the arms with hands, the belt, the apparent garment details — makes a purely non-anthropomorphic interpretation difficult to sustain for at least some of the pillars.

The central pair of pillars in each enclosure, which are larger and more elaborately treated than the perimeter pillars, seem most clearly designed as representations of large, imposing human-like presences at the center of the enclosed space.

Were these figures gods?

Ancestors?

Supernatural beings of some kind not directly translatable into modern categories?

The question is genuinely open.

Archaeological evidence cannot recover the specific beliefs and narratives that the people who built these structures held, and it is dangerous to translate the visual forms of one culture’s symbolic vocabulary into the terms of another without substantial independent evidence.

What can be said is that large, humanoid stone figures at the center of a specially constructed enclosure — in essentially any culture across the archaeological record — suggest a significant and formalized relationship with powerful entities or forces, whether those entities are understood as divine, ancestral, or something more complex.