SOCIETY × TECHNOLOGY
The Tower of Jericho
~10,300 years ago
Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Greenlandian
Jericho, in the Jordan valley, is a settlement mound whose Pre-Pottery Neolithic A levels hold a circular stone tower and a stone wall, raised by a community that made no pottery. The tower has been placed at roughly 8300 BCE and described as by far the oldest known monumental building. Three readings of its purpose have competed ever since it was found: a fortification, a device built to deflect floods, or a symbolic monument. Excavation at Tell Qaramel in northern Syria has since yielded five circular towers that radiocarbon makes older still, so Jericho no longer stands alone at the head of the series. What the stones settle is the collective labour and not the motive: a re-examination of the published data reads the monumental buildings as working at two levels at once, asserting a hold over ground with favourable resources and binding the villagers into obligations that outlast the work.
Why it matters
Moving and stacking stone on this scale asks for more hands than a single household holds, and for someone to settle where each block goes. The certainty lies in the organisation, not in the intention: defence, flood protection and symbolic display all leave much the same heap of stones, which is why the argument has stayed open since the excavation. A social reading of the published data makes the building its own purpose, a way of claiming a territory with favourable resources and of drawing neighbours into obligations that outlive the building site. Read that way, the tower belongs to village life rather than to shelter or defence.
Dating & uncertainty
The tower is placed at roughly 8300 BCE, carried here as ~10,300 years ago within 10,500 to 10,000. That figure is a round one rather than a measurement with a stated error, so the century remains open. The date decides a question of precedence rather than of chronology: radiocarbon on 57 charcoal samples from Tell Qaramel, in northern Syria, puts five circular towers there before the one at Jericho, so the description of Jericho as the oldest monumental building holds only for as long as no earlier sequence is published.
Sources
- Barkai et al. (2008), Time and Mind · Midsummer Sunset at Neolithic Jerichodoi:10.2752/175169708x329345
- Bar-Yosef (1986), Current Anthropology · The Walls of Jericho: An Alternative Interpretationdoi:10.1086/203413
- Mazurowski et al. (2009), Radiocarbon · Chronology of the Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic Settlement Tell Qaramel, Northern Syria, in the Light of Radiocarbon Datingdoi:10.1017/s0033822200056083
- Naveh (2003), Cambridge Archaeological Journal · PPNA Jericho: a Socio-political Perspectivedoi:10.1017/s0959774303000052
Our species’ history as one day
23:12:5447 min 5 s before midnight
if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day