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Prehistoric Architecture
Prehistoric Architecture
Introduction
Earliest Stone Age Men:
Group life now more regular & highly organized
Communities included profl artist & skilled craftsmen.
Bestowed more car upon the bodies of the dead;
painting the corpses, folding the arms over the heart &
depositing pendants, necklaces & richly carved
weapons & tools in the graves
He formulated an elaborate system of sympathetic
magic designed to increase his food supply
Cro- Magnon could count, first systematical record
Must have invented a crude system of writing
Neolithic Culture:
Neolithic man had better mastery of his environment
He was less likely to die from a shift in climatic conditions
or form the failure of some part of his food supply
Devt of agriculture and domestication of animals
Rapid increase in population & promoted a settled
existence
The new culture was the first to distributed around over
the entire world
B. Influences
The organization of settlement and the architectural
structure of houses differed according to regions and
periods and reflected environmental, economic and
social changes taking place during the long prehistoric
period.
Building materials consisted of thick timber posts reeds,
clay (hayclay or mud-bricks) and stone for the
Tell
Trilithion
Ziggurat
D. Architectural Character
3 Germs of later architectural developments:
Hunters and fishermen in primeval times naturally
sought shelter in rock caves, and manifestly the earliest
form of human dwellings;
Tillers and soil took cover under arbours of trees, and
from them fashioned huts of wattle and daub;
Sheperds, who followed their flocks, would lie down
under coverings of skin which only had to be raised on
posts to form tents.
Natural arbours, again, would suggest huts with tree
trunks for walls and closely laid branches, covered with
turf, for roofs
Huts of this character are still in use among primitive
peoples as well as huts of two storeys with external
stairs, in the village of old Jericho.
Tents of sheepskins apeak for themselves and are still
as much in use among Bedouin Arabs and other
nomadic tribes as they can have been in prehistoric
times.
1. Dwellings
a. Huts- consisted of one room huts w/ walls made of
posts, & were built independently of each other (Nea
Nikomedeia).