c8300-7000 BCE Prehistoric Art, Neolithic Art, Jericho

  

 

When we study Jericho in an art history course, we are looking at one of the earliest places where people built permanent architecture and experimented with representing human faces long before writing or large stone monuments. The site we call Jericho today is Tell es-Sultan, an ancient mound near a permanent spring in the southern Jordan Valley. Excavations show many layers of occupation reaching back to the Natufian period, roughly the 10th–8th millennia BCE. By about 8300–8000 BCE, people had built a thick stone wall and a tall stone tower. Later, in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB, about 7500–6000 BCE), they made mudbrick houses, plastered floors, and plastered human skulls that count as some of the earliest portrait-like sculptures in the world.

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The environment around Jericho helps explain why people settled there so early. The site sits next to a reliable spring that supplied fresh water even when the wider region became drier after the last Ice Age. This created an oasis zone with wild cereals such as emmer wheat and barley, as well as shrubs and trees, surrounded by more arid land. Natufian groups used the spring as a seasonal camp as early as 10,500–9,500 BCE, leaving microlith tools and stone sickles for harvesting wild grain. As the climate warmed, some of these groups stayed longer and eventually lived there year-round in small round houses. During the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A(PPNA), people constructed circular houses about five meters across using sun-dried mudbricks of clay and straw with mud mortar. They roofed these structures with wood, reeds, and packed earth. By the later PPNA, the settlement covered a large area and included a stone wall over three and a half meters high and about two meters thick, with a tower more than eight meters tall and an inner staircase. Population estimates vary, but Jericho was a substantial community for its time.

Jericho sits at an important point in the shift from hunting and gathering to early farming. Earlier scholarship assumed that large settlements only developed after full agriculture was established, and that walls and towers were signs of a later stage of society. Revised dating methods and comparisons with sites like Göbekli Tepe show that this assumption does not hold up. Jericho shows permanent settlement and large communal building activity before farming was fully developed. The term Natufian comes from Wadi en-Natuf, a nearby site where similar tools and structures were first identified in 1928. Archaeologists later used the term for other early settlements in the region, including Jericho. This kind of naming practice is common in prehistory and reminds us that cultural labels often come from excavation history rather than from what people called themselves.

The way Jericho was excavated is also part of what makes it important in an art history course. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many archaeologists searched Near Eastern sites hoping to confirm stories in the Hebrew Bible or classical literature. Jerichoappears in the Book of Joshua as a walled city conquered by the Israelites, so early excavators tried to match physical remains to that narrative. Later, in the 1950s, Kathleen Kenyon’s excavations used careful stratigraphic methods and radiocarbon dating to show that the earliest walls and tower at Jericho date to around 8300–8000 BCE, thousands of years earlier than the biblical story. She also showed that Jericho went through many phases rather than being a single occupation. Her work helped shift archaeology away from “biblical archaeology” towardmethods based on physical evidence even when that evidence contradicts written tradition.

 

Stratigraphic excavation is now a standard method for understanding long-occupied sites like Jericho. The idea is straightforward: deeper layers are older than those above them, so documenting each layer and its contents makes it possible to build a sequence of occupation. At Jericho, the method works through a series of steps:

1. Divide the mound into labeled grid squares.
2. Excavate each square slowly, layer by layer, using small tools.
3. Screen soil to catch small artifacts and bones.
4. Record the depth and exact location of every find.
5. Keep the vertical profiles visible and draw the layers.
6. Use radiocarbon dating and comparisons with other sites to estimate calendar dates.

Using this process, Kenyon traced Jericho’s history from early Natufian camps through PPNA and PPNB villages and into later Bronze Age towns.

 

From an architectural point of view, Jericho shows the earliest large-scale use of mudbrick and fieldstone construction that later becomes common in Çatalhöyük and early Mesopotamian cities. Builders made sun-dried bricks by mixing clay-rich mud with sand and straw, shaping them in simple molds, and leaving them to dry. Because this period is still Pre-Pottery, bricks were not fired, and there were no ceramic vessels. To assemble walls, workers stacked the bricks in horizontal rows with wet mud as mortar. Inside houses, they sometimes burned limestone and mixed the resulting lime with water to make plaster for floors and interior surfaces. They also used uncut fieldstones in the lower parts of walls, with mud as the binding material. This does not count as ashlar masonry, because the stones were not cut into uniform shapes. Roofs used a basic post-and-lintel arrangement with wooden beams, reeds, and packed earth. Some towers at the site include internal stone staircases, which show careful planning even without arches or vaults.

 

You can think of Neolithic construction at Jericho as another short process:

1. Mix clay, sand, and straw into a workable mud.
2. Shape the mud into bricks and dry them in the sun.
3. Lay a simple stone foundation if needed.
4. Stack bricks in even courses with mud mortar.
5. Cover floors and walls with lime plaster.
6. Add wooden beams and reed mats for the roof and cover them with earth.

Jericho also appears in art history classes because of the plastered skulls found under house floors in PPNB layers. Around 7000–6000 BCE, some skulls were cleaned of flesh, filled with lime plaster, and modeled to recreate facial features such as cheeks, noses, lips, and eyelids. Shells were placed in the eye sockets. The plaster followed the shape of each bone structure, which makes these skulls some of the earliest portrait-like objects known. They were buried under domestic floors along with other burials and household material. For comparison, modified skull fragments at Göbekli Tepe—dating to about 9600–8000 BCE—show deep carved grooves, drilled holes, cut marks from defleshing, and traces of red ochre, but no plaster modeling. At Jericho, skulls seem connected to households and early farming groups, while at Göbekli Tepe the evidence comes from a ritual site built by hunter-gatherers. Seeing these examples together helps students understand how early communities used architecture and human remains to build social identity during the long transition from mobile foragers to settled agricultural societies.

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