Domestic structures increased in solidity and size during the Epipaleolithic (18,0008000 bce) and early Neolithic (8000-6000 bce). Further, within the Neolithic there was a shift from round to rectilinear houses. It is easier to add to or divide a rectilinear house than a round one, so the shift may point to increasing household size and complexity. Also very different mental concepts are involved in circular and rectilinear architecture. A round house has two units, the continuous wall and a roof. A rectilinear house involves a minimum of five units, four discrete walls and a roof. The investment in a rectilinear house, no matter what size, was higher than in a circular one.
A more permanent definition of private space does not mean that the idea was new, but that visible marking of space had become more important. This may have been due to better definition of edges and internal divisions of communities (Watkins 1992). It might also be linked to notions of land ownership that came with agriculture and household-based production and consumption (Byrd 1994). Or space definition might relate to increases in social distance, as a community increased in size, requiring greater structuring of inhabitants’ interactions and communication of taboos and tolerances.
Public buildings, communally constructed if not necessarily community-accessible, also appeared in the early Neolithic and may be seen as indicators of increased attachment to a place. The tower and settlement wall at Neolithic Jericho is an example that has been identified as defensive (Kenyon 1981), or as a means of water management, or a shrine platform (Bar-Yosef 1986). Neolithic Maghzaliyah, in northern Iraq, had a settlement wall, and in southeast Turkey Neolithic sites had special buildings, distinct from houses in plan, construction, and contents (Hauptmann 1993; (Ozdogan 1999; Schmidt 2000). These buildings may have been exclusive elite advertising, or they may have been communally owned religious structures. But either way, they might have been intended as prominent visual cues of landscape ownership.
World History
