Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and the Tower and wall of Jericho
- Date
- c. 11,700 – 10,000 years ago (c. 9700–8000 BCE)
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Levant (Jordan Valley, Tell es-Sultan)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
With the warming Holocene, communities of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) in the Levant established the first true farming villages, growing cultivated cereals and pulses while still keeping wild-type or barely domesticated crops and lacking pottery.
At Tell es-Sultan (Jericho), in the Jordan Valley, PPNA inhabitants undertook the earliest known monumental communal construction: a massive stone wall enclosing the settlement, an exterior rock-cut ditch, and an attached solid stone tower roughly 8.5 metres tall containing an internal staircase. Built around 8000 BCE, these works required the coordinated labour of a substantial population and represent humanity's oldest surviving large-scale architecture. Their purpose is debated — defence, protection against floods or mudflows, territorial display, or a ritual and astronomical focus have all been proposed. Whatever its function, the Jericho complex shows that sedentary Neolithic villagers could organise collective projects on a scale far beyond anything earlier, marking a profound shift in social cooperation, planning and the human capacity to reshape the built environment.
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Further reading
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