Pre-Pottery Neolithic B culture
Culture | Defunct
8500 BCE to 6200 BCE
Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) is a division of the Neolithic developed by Dame Kathleen Kenyon during her archaeological excavations at Jericho in the southern Levant region.The culture of this period differs from that of the earlier Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period in that people living during this period began to depend more heavily upon domesticated animals to supplement their earlier mixed agrarian and hunter-gatherer diet.
In addition the flint tool kit of the period is new and quite disparate from that of the earlier period.
One of its major elements is the naviform core.
This is the first period in which architectural styles of the southern Levant became primarily rectilinear; earlier typical dwellings were circular, elliptical and occasionally even octagonal.
Pyrotechnology was highly developed in this period.
During this period, one of the main features of houses is evidenced by a thick layer of white clay plaster floors highly polished and made of lime produced from limestone.
It is believed that the use of clay plaster for floor and wall coverings during PPNB led to the discovery of pottery.
Indeed, the earliest proto-pottery was White Ware Vessels, made from lime and gray ash, built up around baskets before firing, for several centuries around 7000 BC.Sites from this period found in the Levant utilizing rectangular floor plans and plastered floor techniques were found at Ain Ghazal, Yiftahel (western Galilee), and Abu Hureyra (Upper Euphrates).
The period is dated to between ca.
9600 and ca.
8000 BP or 7500 - 6000 BCE.Like the earlier PPNA people, the PPNB culture developed from the Earlier Natufian but shows evidence of a northerly origin, possibly indicating an influx from the region of north eastern Anatolia.
The culture disappeared during the 8.2 kiloyear event, a term that climatologists have adopted for a sudden decrease in global temperatures that occurred approximately 8200 years before the present, or c. 6200 BCE, and which lasted for the next two to four centuries.
In the following Munhatta and Yarmukian post-pottery Neolithic cultures that succeeded it, rapid cultural development continues, although PPNB culture continued in the Amuq valley, where it influenced the later development of Ghassulian culture.
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The early Neolithic human occupation of Mesopotamia is, like the previous Epipaleolithic period, confined to the foothill zones of the Taurus and Zagros Mountains and the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys.
The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) period (10,000–8700 BCE) sees the introduction of agriculture.
The Natufian culture in Upper Mesopotamia, contemporaneous with the Zarzian in the Zagros, is attested over a much wider region and is characterized by open-air sites that are semi-permanently occupied.
In the Zagros, this period has been excavated at Zawi Chemi, Shanidar, and M'lefaat.
In the area of the Syrian Upper Euphrates, villages of Natufian hunter-gatherers that were occupied since the eleventh millennium BCE have been excavated at Abu Hureyra and Mureybet.
One such village, established about 9000 in southeastern Anatolia on the Turkish-Iranian border, consists of houses made from mud and reeds, with conical roofs and circular stone bases.
It is the first known example of a permanent settlement.
Copper was known to some of the oldest civilizations on record, and has a history of use that is at least 10,000 years old.
Some estimates of copper's discovery place this event around 9000 BCE in the Middle East.
A copper pendant found in what is now northern Iraq dates to 8700 BCE.
The Neolithic way of life is first achieved in Mesopotamia (the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present Iraq) and in what are today Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel.
The sheep, derived mainly from the Asian Mouflon, is domesticated in the Middle East.
Farming settlements appear in southern Mesopotamia.
Cultivation of wheat, barley, peas, and olives had begun in the ninth millennium BCE, along with domestication of sheep, goats, and pigs.
By this time, most animals that are amenable to domestication, such as cattle and poultry, have already been tamed.
Obsidian, like all glass and some other types of naturally occurring rocks, breaks with a characteristic conchoidal fracture.
A naturally occurring volcanic glass formed as an extrusive igneous rock, Stone Age cultures value it because, like flint, it can be fractured to produce sharp blades or arrowheads, or polished to create early mirrors.
Obsidian is widely traded in the Mediterranean and Near East in the eighth millennium BCE.
Bladed tools found in southwest Iran, dating from around 8000 BCE, are made from obsidian that had been transported from Anatolia.
The Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN, around 9000 to 6000 BCE) represents the early Neolithic in the Levantine and upper Mesopotamian region of the Fertile Crescent.
It succeeds the Natufian culture of the Epipaleolithic (Mesolithic) as the domestication of plants and animals is in its beginnings and triggered by the Younger Dryas.
The Neolithic period is traditionally divided to the Pre-Pottery (A and B) and Pottery phases.
Kathleen Kenyon originally defined these in the type-site of Jericho (Palestine), established by around 8000 BCE during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA).
Jericho is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, with evidence of settlement dating back to 9000 BCE, providing important information about early human habitation in the Near East.
The first permanent settlement was built near the Ein as-Sultan spring, between 10,000 and 9000 BCE and consisted of a number of walls, a religious shrine, and a twenty-three foot (seventeen meter) stone tower with an internal staircase.
Bricks of baked mud are used for the first time around 8000 BCE at Jericho to build houses.
The permanent dwellings of Jericho feature domed roofs of wattle and daub, stone foundations, and door openings.
Some two thousand to three thousand people live within the settlement's walls, outside of which lie fields of cultivated barley and einkorn, a single-grained wheat.
A simple wooden corral would suffice to pen the community's sheep and goats, races recently domesticated, along with pigs and cats.
The Jericho site originally occupied by the Natufian culture is greatly expanded during the eighth millennium BCE under a culture known to archaeologists as the Aceramic, or Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, who build a wall seventeen feet (five point two meters) high around the settlement.
They erect on the west side a round tower, twenty-three feet (seven meters) high, with an internal flight of steps.
The world's people are comparatively few, the technologies simple, and resources plentiful, but the community's indigenous inhabitants evidently require this kind of protection.
We can surmise that the people of ten thousand years ago differed little from us in being wary of strangers, covetous of resources, and inclined to violence.
The settlement ends around 7370 BCE.
Chogha Bonut, located in the Khuzestan Province (Susiana Plain), is believed by archaeologists to have been settled as early as 7200 BCE, making it the oldest lowland village in southwestern Iran.
Çatalhöyük’s mud-brick structures, abutting and presumably entered from the roof, feature wall paintings and reliefs of geometric elements, humans, and animals.
Much of the art features apparently cultic representations of hunting and fertility, a theme also frequently expressed in figurines.
'Ain Ghazal, Jordan, a site that will be inhabited until 5000 BCE and grow to encompass thirty acres (one hundred and twenty thousand square meters), one of the largest known prehistoric settlements in the Near East, is inhabited from 7250 BCE.
Having begun as a typical aceramic Neolithic village of modest size,'Ain Ghazal is set on terraced ground at a valley-side, and is built with rectangular mud-brick houses that accommodate a square main room and a smaller anteroom.
Walls are plastered with mud on the outside, and with lime plaster inside that is renewed every few years.
Being an early farming community, the 'Ain Ghazal people cultivate cereals (barley and ancient species of wheat), legumes (peas, beans and lentils) and chickpeas in fields above the village, and herd domesticated goats.
However, they also still hunt wild animals—deer, gazelle, equids, pigs and smaller mammals such as fox or hare.
Small rural farming communities in the ancient Near East practce imple metallurgy sby at least 7000 BCE.
Crude examples of cold hammered copper from Çayönü, a Neolithic ceremonial settlement in southern Turkey inhabited around 7200 to 6600 BCE, date from as early as 7000.
Çayönü is possibly the place where the pig (Sus scrofa) was first domesticated.
The wild fauna include wild boar, wild sheep, wild goat, and cervids.
The Neolithic environment includes marshes and swamps near the Bogazcay, open wood, patches of steppe and almond-pistachio forest-steppe to the south.
The genetically common ancestor of sixty eight contemporary types of cereal still grows as a wild plant on the slopes of Mount Karaca (Karaca Dag), which is located in close vicinity to Çayönü, according to the Max Planck Institute for Breeding Research in Cologne (reported in Der Spiegel of either March 6 or June 3, 2006.)
The first urban centers appear in the Syria-Palestine region by at least 7000 BCE.
The site of the future city-state of Megiddo, the present mound of Tell el-Muteselim on the Plain of Esdraelon in present Israel, was first occupied at the beginning of the eighth millennium BCE.
The first known use of a rectangular house plan occurs around 7000 BCE near Jericho.