Prehistoric Architecture 4s556u

PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE THE BEGINNINGS OF ARCHITECTURE INTRODUCTION  Architecture is an ancient and necessary art, for people have always sought shelter from the elements, and thus the beginnings of architecture are part of prehistory, the period before the development of written language.  PREHISTORY begins as early as 35,000 BC and extends to about 3,000 BC in the lands of the eastern Mediterranean and until well after 2000 BC in parts of Western Europe. PREHISTORIC SETTLEMENTS AND MEGALITHIC CONSTRUCTION EASTERN EUROPE  Human settlement seems to have originated at the SMALL CLAN or FAMILY LEVEL, with a sufficient number of people living together to provide mutual assistance in hunting and food gathering and t protection against enemies.  Among the earliest huts to be discovered are those at sites in the central Russian Plain (Ukraine) dated to about 14000 BC. Constructed of mammoth bones and pine poles, with a lining of animal skins and a central hearth, the largest dome-shaped hut incorporated skeleton parts from nearly a hundred mammoths in its framework.  Excavations of town sites suggest that larger communities were a much later development. The existence of human settlements depends on an agricultural surplus that enables some people to assume specialized roles (priest, ruler, merchant, craftworker), not directly tied to the production of food.  Two of the earliest known urban communities were JERICHO, Israel (ca. 8000 BC) and the trading town of CATAL HUYUK (6500-5700 BC), in Anatolia, part of present-day Turkey. EASTERN EUROPE  JERICHO was a fortified settlement, with a stone wall up to 27 feet thick enclosing an area of about 10 acres.  Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (8350–7370 BCE); The site is a 40,000 square metre settlement surrounded by a stone wall, with a stone tower in the centre of one wall. This is so far the oldest wall ever to be discovered, thus suggesting some kind of social organization.  The town contained round mud-brick houses, yet no street planning. The identity and number of the inhabitants (some sources say 2000–3000 dwellers) of Jericho during the PPN A period is still under debate.

 It is known that they had domesticated emmer wheat, barley and pulses and hunted wild animals.  Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, 7220 BCE to 5850 BCE .  Expanded range of domesticated plants.  Possible domestication of sheep.  Apparent cult involving the preservation of human skulls, with facial features reconstructed from plaster and eyes set with shells in some cases.  The architecture consisted of rectilinear buildings made of mudbricks on stone foundations. The mudbricks were loaf-shaped with deep thumb prints to facilitate bounding.  No building has been excavated in its entirety. Normally, several rooms cluster around a central courtyard. There is one big room (6.5 m × 4 m) and (7 m × 3 m) with internal divisions, the rest are small, presumably used for storage.  The Middle Bronze Age is perhaps the most prosperous in the whole history of Kna'an. The defenses belong to a fairly advanced date in that period” and there was “a massive stone revetment, part of a complex system” of defenses.  Bronze-age Jericho fell in the 16th century at the end of the Middle Bronze Age, the calibrated carbon remains from its City-IV destruction layer dating to at least 100 BCE. CATAL HUYUK  Although CATAL HUYUK appears to have been unfortified, the town was a dense package of dwellings without streets.  No footpaths or streets were used between the dwellings, which were clustered in a honeycomb-like maze. Most were accessed by holes in the ceiling, which were reached by interior and exterior ladders and stairs.  Thus, the rooftops were used as streets. The ceiling openings also served as the only source of ventilation, letting in fresh air and allowing smoke from open hearths and ovens to escape.  Mud-brick walls and a post-and-lintel timber framework enclosed rectangular spaces that abutted the neighboring houses so that together they established a perimeter town wall.  Houses had plaster interiors characterized by squared off timber ladders or steep stairs, usually placed on the south wall of the room, as were cooking hearths and ovens.  Each main room served as an area for cooking and daily activities. The main rooms contained raised platforms that may have been used for a range of domestic activities.

 All interior walls and platforms were plastered to a smooth finish. Ancillary rooms were used as storage, and were accessed through low entry openings from main rooms.  Interspersed with the houses were windowless shrines containing decorative motifs of bulls and and cult statuettes of deities.  The settlement at Catal Huyuk is the precursor of more sophisticated communities that developed in the fertile valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers at the beginning of the fourth millennium.

PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE Western Europe INTRODUCTION 

In Western Europe, the transition to urban communities was slower in coming, although the shift from hunting-and-gathering societies to larger agricultural groups under the direction of a priest-king was similar to the experience of societies on the eastern rim of the Mediterranean Sea.

MEGALITHIC ARCHITECTURE MEGALITHS (Greek, megas, “large”, and lithos, “stone”) are prehistoric structures built of massive stones, usually for religious or funerary purposes. Four principal types of megaliths can be distinguished: STANDING STONES, ROW ALIGNMENTS, STONE CIRCLES, AND BURIAL CHAMBERS. A. STANDING STONES and ROW ALIGNMENTS Isolated stones, or MENHIRS, are found in scattered sites throughout western and northern Europe and are common in Brittany. The larger examples are probably prehistoric. Some of the smaller ones have been erected in recent times as rubbing stones for cattle.  Ancient stone alignments range from simple pairs of stones to complex arrays of multiple rows extending over a long distance, as at Carnac in Brittany. Some of them may have had an astronomical significance; others, such as the STONE AVENUE at Avebury, England, appear to be a processional way leading to a prehistoric sanctuary. B. STONE CIRCLES Numerous circles or near-circular rings of standing stones exist, mainly in the British Isles. About 1/3 of these appear to have been laid out deliberately in noncircular shapes such as ellipses, flattened circles, and egg-shaped circles; these may have been designed to achieve a whole number ratio between the perimeter and principal diameter of the formation.  This suggests the use of a common measurement, the so-called MEGALITHIC YARD, 0.829m or 2.72 ft. This then implies a knowledge in prehistoric Europe of mensuration and geometry at a

date much earlier than that given by documentary records. Some stone circles in Britain were enclosed within embanked stoneworks, circular or oval in shape. These are known as HENGE MONUMENTS. C. MEGALITHIC TOMBS The most frequently encountered class of megaliths consists of prehistoric stone-built chambers. These are mostly collective tombs in which a number of individuals were buried at intervals over a long period, sometimes as much as 1000 years. Two basic types of burial chambers reflect different religious traditions. AGE GRAVES, in which the burial chamber is reached by a lower and narrower stone-built age, are usually covered by a BARROW (a round earthen mound) or a CAIRN ( a pile of heaped stones); they occur mainly in coastal areas. GALLERY GRAVES have a broader axial chamber of constant width, sometimes divided transversely into segments and are usually covered by long earthen mounds or cairns, often with a concave forecourt. They tend to be distributed inland. FORTIFIED SETTLEMENT While the most substantial remains from prehistory are built in stone, there is no doubt that timber was widely used in most early European settlements. Wood was plentiful and relatively easy to work, but its perishable nature means that wooden buildings are only incidentally preserved.  At Biskupin in northern Poland, an entire prehistoric village from ca. 1000 to 500 BCE was preserved under water until it came to the attention of archeologists during a drought in 1938. Careful investigation revealed a trading community established on an island in a small lake, with houses, streets, and fortifications constructed of wood.  The approximately oval-plan village wall enclosed just over a hundred identical dwellings, arranged in attached rows, all oriented to face south.  An open square just inside the entrance gate functioned as communal open space.  House walls were constructed of horizontal wooden inset into vertical posts, while roofs were of thatch. Each dwelling was preceded by an antechamber, probably used as a stable for animals, while the house had a central stone hearth.  Streets between rows of houses were paved with split logs laid side by side. The perimeter wall was built of rectangular sections of notched horizontal logs filled with earth. Portions of the site have been reconstructed.  The houses measured about 8 x 10m and were ‘log-built’ from pine, with oak used for important structural components. Each house had two main rooms, with a hearth in the largest. The rows of houses were separated by eleven 3m wide timber streets, which linked to an outer road running between the houses and the timber rampart.  The defences were ‘box ramparts’, a type common in this period, constructed using parallel walls of logs, linked by cross pieces, with the space between them filled with earth. At Biskupin this timber and earth wall was 3.5 m thick, and beyond it was a timber breakwater of driven stakes. This would have prevented the approach of boats from the lake, and helped protect the artificial island from erosion. The breakwater was about half a kilometre long, and it required an estimated 18,000 to 20,000 stakes, representing about 4000 trees. The site as a whole required

a huge amount of timber, and a large area of woodland and forest must have been harvested. The lack of social distinction evident in the houses was surprising, and the regularity of plan and use of standardised components was more like something constructed by the Roman army, and confounded the popular view that Iron Age Europe was somehow wild, undisciplined, and individualistic.