From the first dwellings at the beginning of the new era (around 11,000) until the apparition of the first villages, one finds overall, in this region and beyond, an identical architectural development. The first constructions that the Natufians have built were round houses with diameters ranging from three to six meters. Semi-subterranean construction with stone foundations and a wooden upper structure, each “pit-house” possessed in its center a fireplace and had no subdivision (fig. 2 and 3). The houses were often disposed circularly, with a separate edifice meant as communal storage for cereals.
This circular architecture is found in all first settlements, not only in the Fertile Crescent but in many other regions around the world as well, from the teepee of the nomadic Indians of North America and the igloo of the Inuit to the wooden constructions of the Ifugao (Philippines). We find the same pit-houses in China around 4,000 (Banpo Cun), in Egypt a few centuries later, and later still, between 200 CE and 500 CE in the southwest of the United States, in the Indian Shabik'eshchee and Mogollon villages. In Arizona, the Homolovi have used this architecture until the thirteenth century CE. The common trait to all these people is that they were emerging from a nomadic lifestyle, giving form to their sedentary life all in an identical way.
Fig. 2: Circular architecture at ’Ain Mallaha (Palestine)
When their sedentarization process began, all these communities implemented the social structures inherited from the previous period, from the time of nomadism. Rather than a rupture, the new lifestyle certainly extended the nomadic communal traditions, even more so as hunting kept them alive.
Furthermore, in the Levant, there is no evidence of a brutal break with the past. On the contrary, everything seems to indicate that the transformations marking the beginning of the Neolithic era have gradually been put into practice. This allows us to conclude that the social and economic structures found in the first settlements of the Natufian period were the same as those existing at the end of the Paleolithic. The new habitat materialized some of these structures. Hence, the circular pit-houses embodied the architectural expression of these ancestral traditions. This explains why most nomadic populations use for their first architectural steps an identical structure that reflects a similar background.
Nomadism is characterized by a weak degree of differentiation: the relationships within the community are “egalitarian,” implying that all goods necessary for the survival belong to the community, personal possessions being limited to what each can carry during displacements. The fact that everyone has to collect food and the impossibility to create surpluses also minimize any hierarchical differentiation. Obviously, social cohesion has been the cement that allowed these communities to survive [9].
The non-differentiated architecture of the Natufian village mirrors this social and economic egalitarianism. The absence of division and the communal storage installations confirm the absence of a privatization of space and property. Besides, disposing their houses in a semi-circle surrounding a central space reveals an organization centered on the community, its size being sufficiently restricted to ensure that everyone would have its place in the common space: the habitat was meant to create a non-individualized social environment, egalitarian, public, and open.
Fig. 3: Circular agglutinated houses in Jerf el Ahmar (Syria)
Around 9,600, the climatic improvement that follows the Younger Dryas announces a fresh start for the sedentarization process. While some Natufian sites are reinvested, new ones appear. Their size is three to eight times the size of the most important sites from the Natufian period, some of them like Jericho (Palestine) and Mureybet (Syria) becoming real villages [see the map of cited sites]. Everywhere, we find pit-houses, round or oval, sometimes separated by a space, but at other times agglutinated together like in Jerf el Ahmar (Syria) (fig. 3) or in Jericho, which was an amalgam of circular and oval dwellings of three to five meters of diameter. The communal silo becomes a constant element of these sites.
Around 8,000, architecture in the Levant changes: the round pit-houses make room for rectangular houses built of bricks on ground level. The internal subdivisions that appear clearly indicate the beginning of a privatization of space.
Although it is impossible to determine the reasons for this transformation in the habitat, we are inclined to think that demographic growth deeply modified the social structure of these communities, and that the new architecture reflects a change in their population.
The reasons behind demographic growth are multiple:
1) The number of pregnancies of settled women is double that of nomadic women
2) The stability brought by the new lifestyle increases the chance that the children will survive, and prolongs the lifespan of adults, compensating for the epidemics that appeared at the beginning of sedentarization
3) The increased need for labor force and the possibility to feed it allow non-settled foreign individuals to enlarge the ranks of the village
Demographic expansion will require transforming the traditional habitat. It will be necessary to increase the number of dwellings and to adapt them to accommodate more people, which rectangular architecture facilitates.
The traditions of the community will be shaken by this population increase. The ties that clearly connected all its members until then are now becoming opaque, slowly eroding communal identity [11]. In addition, the economic homogeneity that prevailed in the restricted community is gradually dissolving, letting the first inequalities appear. The disappearance of the communal silos and their apparition inside each dwelling confirms the introduction of a form of private property.
The size of the houses does not vary much during the first part of the Neolithic. However, the habitable surface becomes considerably bigger toward the end of the PPNB [12]. At ’Ain Ghazal (Jordan) for example, during the second half of the seventh millennium, the dwellings can accommodate up to 20 people under one roof. With several kitchens, hearths and rooms for storage, they reveal a change in the social and economic organization of these communities. In fact, the stability that characterized the first half of the Neolithic has now disappeared, due principally to the deterioration of the climatic conditions, and to soil exhaustion and erosion. Having to diversify their economy to compensate for the poor yields of their impoverished land, most communities will introduce pastoralism. The transformation in the habitat indicates that a different social structure has been introduced, better adapted to cope with the new economic conditions: each household had to be large enough to provide for its members, and to be represented in all activities at the same time.
We also witness the reemergence of a semi-nomadic lifestyle, partly due to the introduction of pastoralism, but also because some communities will begin abandoning the site they have occupied for centuries. With the return to nomadism, circular architecture most curiously reappears, a long time after this style has been replaced by rectangular architecture. In Syria toward 6,300-6,200 for example, small round dwellings resurface after having been abandoned for more than 2,500 years, while a fall in temperature and in precipitation transforms regions that were naturally irrigated into desert zones.
The reappearance of circular architecture with the return to a (semi-)nomadic lifestyle corroborates the idea that this architectural form was related to a specific way of life and to the prevalence of a community-centered economy, suggesting that these ancestral traditions had not been erased from the collective memory [13].
As we have seen in the first part, most primitive communities that had not yet discovered the procreative role of men were organized around the matrilineal family, composed of the mother, her children, and their maternal uncles and aunts, as well as their children. Although ill adapted for the Paleolithic hordes, those “fragile and temporary aggregations of individuals,” [Wilk & Rathje, 1982; see also Part One, endnote 7] matrilineal lineages were gradually introduced to organize settled life in large Neolithic communities, the social and economic life of which rested in the hands of women. Hence, the first subterranean pit-houses embodied the Paleolithic heritage: they could accommodate two to three individuals and were distributed according to gender, women and children separated from men, as was recently practiced by the Bedouins (Middle East) and the Munduruku (Amazon) [14]. Even more so since such a distribution perfectly integrated the negative representations attached to women: under no circumstance would the Asmat warrior let a woman approach his shield, or would the Sambia man risk being contaminated by female elements. It seems definitely improbable that men who thought the proximity of menstruating (or pregnant) women to be ominous or even fatal would share with them the place where they rested and the moments when they were the most vulnerable. We can therefore conclude that these populations, at the beginning of their sedentarization process, distributed the habitat by separating rather than by mixing the sexes [15].
It is only later, when the houses become bigger and possess several kitchens and storage rooms, that we can definitely establish the implementation of a distribution around the extended family based, during most of the Neolithic era, on matrilineal lineages. This distribution also fits the growing difficult conditions of the last period of the Neolithic during which the communities had to diversify their activities.
Let us cite the recent example of a Brazilian tribe that combined an extended family structure with tribal values and promiscuous relationships: “The Zo’é live in large rectangular thatched houses which are open on all sides. Here several families live together, sleeping in hammocks slung from the rafters and cooking over open fires along the sides… The Zo’é are polygamous, and both men and women may have more than one partner. It is fairly common for a woman with several daughters to marry several men, some of whom may later marry one of her daughters.
Everyone is equal in Zo’é society. There are no leaders, though the opinions of particularly articulate men, known as ‘yü’, carry more weight than others in questions of marriage, opening up old gardens or establishing new communities.” [Survival International, April 2013]