Westen Europe

In Weatrn Eurpoe, where Plleolithic paintings and sculptures abound no comparably developed towens of the time of Catal Hoyuk have been found. However, in succeeding millennia, perhaps as early as 4000BCE, the local Neolithic populations in several areas developed a monumental aechitecture employeing massive rough-cut stones.The very dimensions of the stones, some as high as 17 feet and weighing as much as 50 tons, have prompted historians to call them megaliths (great stone) and to designate Neolithic architecture employing megaliths as megalithic.

NEWGRANCE 

One of the most imprassive megalithic monuments in Europe is also one of the oldest . The megalithic tomb at newgrangein Ireland, north of dublin, may have been constructed as early as 3200 BCE and is one of the oldest burial monuments in Eurpoe.It takes the from of a passage grave, that is a tomb with a long stone corridor leading to a burial chamber all covered by a great timulus (earthen burial mound). Passage graves have been found also in England, France,Spain and Scandinavia.All attest to the importance of honoring the dead in Neolithic Scocitey, Some mounds contain more then one passage grave. The Newgrange tumulus is 280 feet in diameter and 44 feet tall.Its passageway is 62 feet long and is an early example of aconstruction technique uaes in other later ancient culture and even today-the corbeled vault.At Newgrange, huge megaliths form the ceiling of the passage and the burial chamber.The stones are held in place by their own weight. Those on one side countering the weight of the megaliths on the other side of the p[assageway. Some of the stone are decorated with incised sprial and other abstract motifs.A special feature of the Newgrange tomb is that at the winter solstice the sun illuminates the passageway and tah burial chamber.

STONEHANGE 

The most famous megalithic monument in Europe is Stonehange  on the Salisbury Plain in southern England. A henge is an arrangement of megalithic stone in a circle, often surrounded by a ditch, The type is almost entirely limited to Britain. Stonehange is a complex of rough cut sarsen ( a form of sand stone )stones and smaller”bluestone”(various volcanic rocks)built in several stages Over hundred of years. The final hange took the form of concentric post and lintel circel. The outer ring, almost 100 feet in diameter, consists of a huge sarsan megaliths.Inside is a ring of blue stone , which in turn encircle a houseshoe(open and faceing east) of trilithons (three stone constructions) five lintal topped paris of the largest sarsens,each weighting 45 to 50 tone.Standing apart and to th east is the “ heel stone”which, for a person looking outward from the center of the complex, would have marked in point where  the sun rose at the summer  solstic, Stonehange seem to have been a kind of astronomical observatory and a remarlable accurate solar calender.The megalithic tombs , tamples and hange of Europe are enduring testaments to the rapidly developing intellecutual powers of Newlithic human as well as to their capasity for heroic physical effort.

Ancient Near East

   JERICHO 

By 7000 BCE, AGRICULTURE WAS WELL ESTABLISHED FROM Anatolia to  ancient Plaestine and Iran. Its advanced state by this date presupposes a long deevelopment. Indeed, the very  existance of a major settlement such as jericho gives strong support to this assumption.The site of jericho a plateau in the jordan River vally with a spring that provided a constant water supply  was occupied by asmall village as early as the ninth millennium BCE. The viilage  underwent spectacular development around 8000 BCE, when the inhabitants built anew Neolithic settlement covering about 10 actes. Its mud bricks houses sat on round or ovel stone foundations and had roofs of branches covered with earth.

Great stone tower built into the settlement wall, jericho ca8000-7000 BCE

Neolithic jericho was protected by 5 foot-thick walls and at least one stone tower 30 feet and 33feet in diameter –an outstanding achievement that marks the beginning of monumental architecture.

As jericho’s wealth grew, the need for protection against marauding nomads resulted in the first knewn premanent stone fortifications.By approximatly 7500 BCE, a wide rock-cut ditch and a 5-foot- thick wall surrounded the town, estimated to have had a population of more then 2,000 people. Into the circuit wall, which has been preseverdto a height  of almost 13 feet, was built a great circular tower of roughly shaped stones laid without mortar and originally about 30 feet high. Almost 33 feet in diameter at the base, the tower has as inner stairway leading to its summit. ( today , a greats covers the entrance to the stairway). Not enough of the site has been excavated to detemine whether this tower was solitary or one of several similar towers sthat formed a complete defanse system.In either case, a structure as large as this was a tremendous technological achievement and a testimony to the builders ability to organize a signifiacnt workforce. The wall and tower  of jericho mark the beginning of the long history of monumental architecture.

Human figure from Ain Ghazal, jordan ca 6750-6250 BCE plater painted and inlaid with bituman .3’5” high louvre Paris

AIN GHAZAL 

Near Amman, jordan the construction of a highway in 1974 revealed another important Neolithic settlement in ancient Palestine at the site of Ain Gazal occupied from ca 7200 to 5000 BCE The  inhabitants builte houses of irregularly shaped stone but carefully plasterred and then painted their floors and walls red. The most striking finds at Ain Ghazal however are two caches containing three dozan plasterstatuettes and busts some with two heads, dateable to ca 6500 BCE .The  sculpture appear to have been ritually buried,. The figures were fashioned of white plaster which was built up over a core of reeds and twine. The sculptors used black bituman, a tarlike substance, to delineate the pupils of the eyes. One some of the later figurs painters added clothing. Only rarely did the artists indicate the gender of the figures. Whatever their purpose, by their size (as much as tree feet tall) and sophisticated technique, the Ain Ghazal statuettes and busts are distinguished from Paleolithic figurines such as the tiny venus of Willendrof and even the foot-tall Hohlenstein-stadel ivory statuettes.They mark the beginning of mounumental sculpture in the ancient Near East.

NEOLITHIC ART

                 NEOLITHIC ART

Around 9000 Bec, the ice that covered much of northern Europe during the paleolithic period melted as the climate grew  warmer. The sealevel rose more then 300 feet, separating England from continental Europe and spain from Africa . the reinder migrated north,and the wooly mammoth disappeared. The palelolithic gave to a transitional period,the Mesolithic , and then, for several thousend years at different times is different parts of the globe, a great new age, the Neolithic, dawned. Human beings began to domesticate plant and animals and to settle in fixed abodes, Their food supply assured, many grouped changed from hunters to herders, to farmers,and finally to townspeople.Wandering hunters settled down to organizedcommunity livings in villages surroundedn by cultivated fields.

The basis for the conventional division of prehistory into the Paleolithic, Mesolithic,and Neolithic periods is the development of stone impelements. However, a different kind of distinction may be made between an age of food gathering and an age of food production. In this scheme, the Paleolthic period corresponds roughly to the age of food gathering and the Mesolithic period, the last phase of that age is marked by intensified food gathering and the taming of the dog.In the neolithic period,agriculture and stock raising became humankind’s major food sources. The transition to the Neolithic occurred first in the ancient Near East

                   Ancient Near East

The remains of the oldest known settled communities have been founde in the grassy foothills of the antilebanon, Taurus, and Zagros mountains in present-day Turkey, Syria Iraq and Iran These regions provided the necessary precondition for the  development of agriculture.Species of native plants, such as wild wheat and barley, were plentiful as were heards of animals (goats, sheeps,and pigs) that could be domesticated. Sufficient rain occurred for the raisingof crops. When village farming life was wwell developed, some settlers,attracted by the greater fertility of the siol and perhaps alsoby the need to find more land for their rapidly groeing populations, moved into the vallyes and deltas of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

In additions to systematic agriculture the new sedentary societies of the Neolthic Age originated weaving, metalworking, pottery and countings and recording with caly tokens. Soon these innovations spread with remarlable speed throughout the near east . village farming communites such as jarmo in Iraq and Catal Hoyukin southren Anatolia date back to the mid-seventh milennium BCE. 

Neolithic sites in Anatolia and the Near East

The  remarkabl fortifide town of jericho, before whose walls the biblical joshua appeared thousends of years later is even older. Artchaeologists are constantly uncovering surprises and discovery and exploration of new sites each year are compelling Them to revise their views about the emergenceof Neolithic socity, But there sited known for some time –jericho Ain Ghazal and Catal Huyuk-offer a fascinating picture of the rapid and  exciting transformation of human society and of art during the Neolithic period.