From cave to architecture: Settling down in southwest Asia

Human “place-making” began to emerge when early humans began making the hearth the center of social life perhaps a million years ago. Some time after they had begun to use caves in southwest Asia around 450 kya (thousand years ago), they also sometimes buried a dead member of their group under the floor, linking memory-making to place-making. Hunter-gatherer groups began to settle at least seasonally from around 24 kya, and from 13,000 BCE groups were creating settlements formed of permanent stone buildings. Relatively large, permanently co-resident communities became the norm from the beginning of the Holocene period. The archaeological Neolithic, represents a transformation of the cultural niche, involving major environmental-economic, social and cultural innovations, among which was the emergence of architecture, the making of monuments and the creation of systems of material symbolic representation. The “built environments” of the Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation in southwest Asia were “designs for social living”. The Neolithic – 9600-6000 BCE – was an extraordinarily dynamic period that saw emergent, proto-urban, hierarchical settlement patterns, complex economic relations, and new technologies. Neolithic communities were an expensive and demanding way of living together in dense, richly symbolic, social townscapes that were cultural and social landscapes of memory such that we can recognize them through their architecture and rituals as the first “imagined communities.”