Natufian Round Houses

The Natufian culture of the Levant, dated roughly 15,000 to 11,500 years before present, built some of the earliest permanent houses in the world. Natufian communities were sedentary or semi-sedentary before agriculture, and their settlements were larger and longer-lived than those of earlier hunter-gatherers. Their characteristic dwelling was a round, one-room house with its floor cut into the ground and its lower walls faced with stone.

Ain Mallaha (Eynan)

The best-known example is Ain Mallaha in the upper Jordan Valley of northern Israel, discovered in 1954 and excavated by Jean Perrot, Monique Lechevalier and François Valla of the CNRS. It was occupied about 14,326 to 12,180 calibrated years before present, and the village was built in three phases. The first two phases had massive stone-built structures; the third had smaller ones.

Features of the houses:

• Form: circular, semi-subterranean, one-room huts, in Kathleen Kenyon's description, who counted about 50.
• Walls: dry stone lining the sunken floor, with surrounding walls up to 1.2 m (3.9 ft) high.
• Floors: paved with flat slabs in places, with hearths inside and decoration in white or red.
• Roof: wooden posts set inside the house carried the roof, which was probably covered with brushwood or animal hides. Nothing of the superstructure survives.

Burials were placed inside some dwellings; one house contained the graves of 11 people and another, dwelling 131, held 12.

Other sites

Natufian occupation also used caves and their terraces, as at El Wad on Mount Carmel. At Abu Hureyra in Syria, phase 1A dwellings of about 11,300-10,800 cal BCE are described as pit dwellings. Storage facilities appear at some sites but not all.

Significance for roofing history

The Natufian house combines three ideas that recur through later building: digging the floor down to gain height and shelter, using stone for the part of the wall most exposed to damp and wear, and carrying a light roof on internal posts. Because the roof sat on posts inside the stone ring rather than on the wall itself, its span and weight were limited, which fits the modest diameters of these houses. The round plan continued into the early Neolithic of the region before rectangular houses became common.