Neolithic Art (New Stone Age)

8000 - 3000 BC

Otherwise known as New Stone Age, the Neolithic period was a

time when people were living in real village-like settings, with
farms including animals (now domesticated), crops (grains and
eventually rice) and even items that we consider art. (These
people are still, essentially hunters and gatherers).

Things like pottery and woven items were typical creations of the
people of this time period. Functional art you might say.

The melting of glaciers of the Ice Age is beginning to have

profound changes ALTHOUGH these changes occur VERY slowly.
This change did not occur overnight and at the same time for
different groups of people, but gradually over thousands of years.
 ARCHITECTURE

•Neolithic people began to build structures to serve as dwellings

and storage spaces, they also used this area as an area to keep
their animals.

•Neolithic people, like their Paleolithic predecessors, continued

to construct buildings out of wood and other plant materials.

•People clustered their dwellings in villages and eventually larger

towns, and outside their settlements, they built tombs and ritual
centers.

•Around 4,000 BC, Neolithic settlers began to strategically locate

settlements at sites that were easy to defend- near rivers, on
plateaus, or even in swamps. The Fertile Crescent becomes the
center of some of the oldest cities.
• The oldest known settled communities have been
discovered in the fertile crescent in the Tigris/Euphrates
river valley

• In addition to agriculture these sedentary settlements

also originated weaving, metal working, pottery, and
counting and recording with tokens.

• New sites are discovered each year but the oldest and
most studied three are Jericho in the West Bank, Ain
Ghazal in Jordan, and Catal Hoyuk in Anatolia.
 Jericho began as a small town and then
Jericho went through a period of rapid expansion
around 8000BCE.
Great Stone Tower
The village grew to a town that covered
10 acres.

By 7500 BCE the town was believed to

have a population of over 2000 people
and was surrounded by a ditch and a five
foot high wall creating a total wall height
of approximately 13 feet.

Attached to this wall is a round stone

tower with an inner staircase leading to
the summit.

Later becomes one of the first areas

of plant domestication.
jericho
 I. Jericho
• By 9,000 B.C.E., a
settlement had grown
up near an abundant
spring in the Jordan
river valley at Jericho.
 Jericho:
the oldest discovered village
 Jericho

~8000 BCE
People at Jericho lived in round huts (made of mud
brick) about 5 meters across.

As many as 2,000 people might

have lived at Jericho.

In addition to the round mud-brick huts, Jericho was

surrounded by a stone city wall, with a stone tower
attached to the inside. The tower had a staircase inside
of 22 steps, each made of a single block of stone.
 Jericho’s Walls
Sometime after the
founding of the town, a
wall was built around it,
enclosing ca. 10 acres.
The wall itself was 6.5
feet thick and is
preserved to a height of
almost 20 feet.
This is the earliest known
fortification in the world.
 Jericho’s Tower

 Even more extraordinary was

a circular stone tower
constructed just inside the
wall.
 It was 8.5 meters in diameter
and preserved to a height of
7.75 meters.
 An enclosed stairway led to
the top.
 Oldest piece of monumental
architecture in the world.
 Burial rituals in Jericho and other Neolithic villages

• “Often, headless bodies—

sometimes with the lower jaw
still attached to the skeleton—
were buried beneath the floors
of the houses, and the skulls
deposited elsewhere in
groups. . . . Occasionally the
skulls were decorated.

• Some had been scraped with a

sharp blade, others painted
with red ocher or bitumen, and
a few had shells placed in the
eye sockets with the features
modeled in plaster.”
II. Catal Huyuk

c. 6500 B.C.E.
 Catal Hoyuk
A Town Without Streets
• Catal Hoyuk was flourishing city between 7000 and 5000 BCE.
Twelve levels of building have been excavated by
archaeologists at the site.

• Catal Hoyuk's prosperity appears to have come from a

thriving trade in obsidian, a volcanic glasslike stone used in
the manufacture of tools and weapons.
Catal Huyuk
• “Catal Huyuk is a city which dates from 6500 BC to 5400 BC. It was
excavated by James Mellaart from 1961 to [1965].

• It was a Neolithic city located in central Turkey. The site covers 32 acres
making it the largest Neolithic settlement in the Near East.

• The site had rectangular houses with shared common walls. The houses
contained a hearth and mudbrick platforms for sleeping or work area.
• The economy of Catal Huyuk was based on simple irrigation
agriculture, sheep and cattle breeding, and the trade of obsidian,
textiles, skins, food items and information.

• The obsidian (volcanic rock) was used to make projectile points,

daggers and obsidian mirrors.

• The use of bone for tools and pendants were also found. The
ceramics consisted of oval bowls and jars.”
A section of an earlier dig
• This town seems to be one of the first attempts at urban living.
The city plans seem to be laid out in a regular pattern with one
notable exception. There are no streets.

• All the homes in Catal Hoyuk are adjoining and have no doors.
Access to the homes is from a door that also serves as a chimney
on the roof.

• This layout actually provided greater stability for the structures

and also created an easily defensible position
This is an artist's recreation of the village of Çatal Hüyük in what is today
Turkey. The village had a population of between 5,000 and 6,000 people
and was built around 6800 B.C. Notice that the houses were built so close
together that one had to enter each house through a hole in the roof.
 Evidence of culture at Catal Huyuk
• Shrines
• Wall paintings
• Figurines
Drawing of wall painting of
vulture and corpses, Level VII, late
7th millennium.
Reconstructed view of Level VI house ("shrine") with wall-
relief figure of female giving birth.
 Catal Huyuk
6500-5500 BCE
Archaeologists at work
• Finally, the homes in Catal Hoyuk were found to contain painted
and decorated rooms. While many archaeologists have named
these decorated spaces shrines, their actual function is by no
means certain.

• These rooms display wall paintings, plaster reliefs, animal heads

and bucrania, bull skulls.

• Bull Horns, believed to be a symbol of male potency are

prominently displayed in these rooms, often next to plaster
breasts, symbols of female fertility

• The rooms also contain small terra cotta figurines, the largest
being about 12 inches in length
 A mural of two animals

A fertility goddess

A pottery bowl with tripod

stand
A skeleton found in a house.
 Western Europe’s
Megaliths and Henges
• In Western Europe there are no town sites that parallel
the activity seen in the Near East. However as early as
4000 BCE these cultures developed a type of massive
architecture using huge rough hewn stones, some
weighing 50 tons and standing 17 feet high.
• The sheer size of the stones have caused archaeologists to
name then megaliths and the cultures who erected them
as megalithic.
• While megaliths are common throughout modern Europe,
the arrangement of the stones into a circle surrounded by
a ditch seems to be exclusive to the British Iles.
• The most famous of these British henges is of course
Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain.
Neolithic art (New Stone Age--(6,000-1,500 B.C.)
Human beings learned to manipulate nature, they
invented agriculture, which allowed production of a food
surplus which allowed human to begin to live in such
fixed village settlements.
 Skara Brae
• Buried into the southern shore of Sandwick's Bay o' Skaill is
the Neolithic village of Skara Brae - one of Orkney's most
visited sites and rightly regarded as one of the most
remarkable monuments in Europe.

• In the winter of 1850, a great storm battered Orkney.

• Nothing particularly unusual about that, but on this occasion

the combination of Orkney's notorious winds and extremely
high tides stripped the grass from a large mound known as
Skerrabra.

• This revealed the outline of a series of stone buildings that

intrigued the local laird, William Watt of Skaill, who began an
excavation of the site.
 Skara Brae
An early Neolithic village
Skara Brae Housing

Early Houses
were circular
The later houses followed the
same design as their
predecessors but on a larger
scale.

The shape of the houses

changed slightly, becoming
more rectangular with rounded
internal corners, and the beds
were no longer built into the
wall but protruded into the main
living area.
 Passages
• A winding network of passages low, narrow stone passage
linked the houses of Skara Brae.
• This meant it was possible to travel from one house to
another without having to step outside - not a bad thing in
the midst of an Orkney winter!
• Just over one metre high, the low passages were roofed with
stone slabs before being covered over with insulating midden.
• The height of the passages not only helped minimise drafts
but could have served a symbolic, or even defensive, purpose,
forcing the person entering the village to kneel or stoop.
 Life in Skara Brae
• Life in Skara Brae was probably quite comfortable by Neolithic standards.
The villagers were settled farmers who, cultivating the land and raising
livestock, were entirely self-sufficient.
• Bones found within the midden surrounding the houses shows that cattle
and sheep formed the main part of the Skara Brae diet, with barley and
wheat grown in the surrounding fields.
• To compliment their farming produce, fish and shellfish were harvested in
great quantities - and perhaps kept fresh within custom-built tanks within
the houses.
• The island's red deer and boar were also hunted for their meat and skins.
Seal meat was consumed and, on the odd occasions when they found a
beached whale, its meat would have provided a welcome feast.
• They probably also the collected the eggs of sea-birds and possibly even
the birds themselves - a task that took place in the islands until fairly
recently.
 Religion
• They left no written records of their beliefs and religious
practices so we are forced to make assumptions based on
various objects and clues found at the sites they visited and
used on a regular basis.
• Skara Brae's similarity to the architecture of the nearby tombs
shows that ritual formed a considerable part of everyday life
and in death. Given the effort put into the construction of
these tombs we can also say with a degree of certainty that
the dead were very important to the Neolithic Orcadians.
• It seems likely, therefore, that some form of ancestor worship
took place but whether this took precedence over the
veneration over a pantheon of deities is obviously not known.