Architecture and the symbolic construction of new worlds

Trevor Watkins
University of Edinburgh
A significant change occurred at the
beginning of the Neolithic in southwest
Asia as far as architecture is concerned.
By contrast with preceding periods, communities engaged in a great deal of effort
and concern for the architecture of houses, communal buildings, and the organization of whole settlements. There were
undoubtedly important social factors at
work in the new, permanent, sedentary
village communities that emerged in the
Epi-palaeolithic period, but there were
more significant cognitive and cultural
developments that enabled people to
develop new frameworks of symbolic
representation that were worked out
in concrete terms in buildings, their
fittings, their use, and the planning of
settlements. I propose that systems of
non-linguistic, external symbolic representation and storage were devised
around the beginning of the Neolithic
period, several thousand years before
the first proto-scripts. In southwest Asia,
there was a fortuitous coincidence of
the beginnings of sedentism and permanent villages on the one hand and the
co-evolution of cognitive and cultural
faculties for external symbolic storage
on the other hand. Architecture and the
built environment, as we know, frame
and help to form our perceptions. They
form theatres of memory, the arena
within which social and other relations
are played out. And the settlements of
the earliest Neolithic in south-west Asia
show how, for the first time in human
history, people were discovering this
power to form, conceptualise and symbolise their living environment. Living
in a built environment for the first time
constituted inhabiting symbolic worlds
of their own construction, opening the
way to the formation of new, larger,
richer social worlds.

beginning of the Neolithic in south-west

Asia, Cauvin argued, presents quite differently from the immediately preceding
Epipalaeolithic. For him, it was la rvolution des symboles au Nolithique, and
the dominant symbols were of a female
divinity and divine male principle. Each
year since Cauvin first published these
ideas, and particularly each year since
his death in 2001, we have seen the discovery of more and more sites with rich
sculptural imagery, and we can now see
that there is more symbolic representaLa rvolution
tion than just the figuring of a male and
des symboles au Nolithique
female pair of divinities. And more and
My starting point is with the work of more of this rich repertoire of imagery is
Jacques Cauvin (1994; revised and contained within monumental architecupdated English edition 2001). The tural contexts. I want to develop a theory
15

Figure 1:
Sculpted monoliths sucfrom Gbekli Tepe have
led to the interpretation
of the site as a cult centre
related to the economic
geographers notion of a
central place.
Illustration by Raina
Stebelsky

15

Living in
a built environment
for the first time
constituted inhabiting
symbolic worlds of
their own construction,
opening the way to
the formation of new,
larger, richer
social worlds.

16

concerning the use of architecture in

the early Neolithic, whether for single
buildings or for structuring whole settlements. I want to develop the thesis
that the realization of the potential
of architecture for constituting and
embodying cultural ideas that framed
the way that people lived was a phenomenon that makes the people of the
earliest Neolithic in an important sense
the first people to be substantially like
ourselves. It needs to be made clear at
the outset that I am not trying to claim
that culture in the Neolithic period was
categorically different from culture in
the preceding Epipalaeolithic period.
The evolution of human cognition and
its employment of culture was a gradual process, but, around the beginning
of the Holocene period, the evolutionary process passed through a critically
important threshold in the emergence
of fully symbolic culture, opening the
way to a rapid florescence of richly
symbolic cultural worlds.
First, lets be clear on the sequence
and the chronology. From the transition between the Upper Palaeolithic
and the Epipalaeolithic periods
(around 20,000 years ago, and before
Period 0 in the system developed by
Jacques Cauvin and his colleagues at
the Maison de lOrient in Lyon), some
hunter-gatherer societies had begun
to develop new settlement and subsistence strategies. These involved
increased reliance on stored harvests
of pulses, cereals and other grasses.
Greater reliance on stored harvests
implied longer periods of residence in
one base-camp. Arguably from the very
earliest Epipalaeolithic (for example,
at Ohalo II Nadel, & Hershkovitz
1991; Nadel, this volume; Nadel &
Werker 1999; Kislev, Nadel, & Carmi
1992), some hunter-gatherer communities were resident at a single location
within an immediately accessible territory of diverse ecological zones that
offered richly varied food resources. By
the last phase of the Epipalaeolithic,
Period 1, equivalent to the Natufian in
Israel, Jordan and Syria, it is possible to
point to a number of communities that
had become fully or effectively sedentary, living in permanent village communities and permanent built environments, employing the proto-types of
symbolic architecture.
16

Building design, settlement planning

While there are interesting signs in
Period 1 of what was to come, as Cauvin
has argued, from the beginning of the
Neolithic, Period 2, equivalent to the
PPNA of the Levantine region, there
was an explosion of symbolic activity.
Communities of the earliest Neolithic
show a great deal of cultural concern
with the architecture of buildings and
the organization of whole settlements.
This was slowly driven into my consciousness through the experience of
excavating Qermez Dere in north Iraq
in the late 1980s (Watkins et al. 1991;
Watkins et al. 1995; Watkins 1990, 1992,
1996). The small settlement at Qermez
Dere had been laid out in two contrasting
halves that performed complementary
functions. Part way through its life, the
village was re-formed, but once again in
two complementary halves. This time,
the southern half of the site was used for
houses that were dug into what had been
a dumping area for all sorts of debris and
waste in the earlier stage of the history of
the village. The buildings were extraordinary for the care with which they were
built and the persistent maintenance
and renovation that was lavished on
them. One house, which we carefully
disassembled over several seasons of
investigation, had been rebuilt at least
three times. And each phase showed
repeated replastering and modification
of the internal details. Impressed by
the expensively repeated rebuildings,
elaborate care expended in their maintenance, and the pairs of nonstructural
pillar-like features that each contained, I
suggested that these houses were more
than shelters from the elements; rather,
they reminded me of the ways in which
we in our cultural traditions have made
our houses into homes (Watkins 1990).
Home, I should not have to remind
you, is a cultural or social construct an
allusion to the work of the American
philosopher John Searle (1995), and his
discussion of the construction of social
reality.
Much more dramatic is the site of Jerf
al-Ahmar, on the Euphrates in north
Syria (Stordeur 1998a; 1998b; 1999; 2000;
Stordeur & Jammous 1995; Stordeur et
al. 1996; Stordeur et al. 1997; Stordeur
et al. 2000). The site belongs to Period
2, the earliest aceramic Neolithic period,
coming to an end at the transition to

Period 3, the beginning of the so-called

PPNB of the Levant. Early in the history of the village, there existed a large,
fully subterranean building (EA 30) in an
open space at the centre of the village.
The floor of the structure was more than
2 m below the surface, and the elliptical
building ranged between 6.8 and 7.4 m
across. Stordeur describes it as communautaire, a communal or public building, and argues that it was polyvalent,
or multi-functional. Stordeur believes
that it was at the same time a communal
food storage facility and a building with
religious functions, where meetings and
rituals may have taken place. At the end
of its life, it was emptied, a human head
was placed in it, and in the central area
a decapitated body was spread-eagled.
And then the structure was destroyed
by fire, its burning roof collapsing on the
decapitated body. Finally, the structure
was obliterated as the cavity left by its
destruction was filled with more than
300 m3 of soil. Stordeur (2000: 31, 32,
36) has compared this building with a
very similar building at Tell Mureybet,
maison 47, of very similar date. At
the very end of the excavations, as the
waters were rising, a second, similar, cellular building (EA 7) was found, dating
later in the stratigraphic sequence of the
eastern part of the settlement. It seems
to have been the replacement for EA
30. Two human skulls had been deposited in a recess at the base of one of the
post-holes for the posts that supported
its roof, a foundation deposit that mirrored the skull and corpse that had been
placed in EA 30 at the end of its life.
In the western part of the settlement,
at a later date again, another large subterranean building was constructed (EA
53) on the same general scale as the
earlier buildings, but internally quite
different. Like EA 30, it was a complex
construction with a double skin of walls,
the inner of which included a number
of vertical timber posts. The circular
interior had a bench running around the
wall, and the bench had a kerb formed
of large limestone slabs, decorated with
a frieze of pendant triangles in relief.
Six large roof support posts of fir (Abies),
which must have been brought from
some distance, were set in post-holes
at regular intervals in the kerb. Finally,
Stordeur (2000: 40 & fig. 11) mentions
briefly another, similar structure that

was found only as the waters rose into

the excavations. It, too, had a kerb of
great limestone slabs, each with a frieze
of pendant triangles along its top edge.
One of the slabs was also carved with
an additional design that seems to have
been a schematic representation of a
headless human body. And that slab was
flanked by two, tall stelae topped with
vulture-like heads and a collar of pendant triangles at the neck.
And very recently, excavation of another early aceramic Neolithic site on the
Euphrates in north Syria, upstream from
Jerf al-Ahmar, Tell Abr 3, has begun
to reveal a further example of a central, communal, circular building (Yartah
2004). The communal building at Tell
Abr, of which only a fragment survived,
was between 10 and 12 m in diameter,
more than 1.5 m below ground level
(but, allowing for the above-ground wall,
about 2 m from floor to roof), and it had
been burnt as part of its abandonment.
Like Building EA30 at Jerf al-Ahmar,
the Tell Abr building had a bench
around the interior, fronted by a kerb
of large, limestone slabs. At the front of
the kerb, there was a circle of wooden
posts that had supported a roof structure,
collapsed and burnt mud from which was
found on the floor. Several slabs carved
with simple, linear geometric designs or
schematically drawn animals were found
set on edge between the posts and in
front of the kerb.
Structured settlements and central,
communal buildings are not confined
to Syria. A cluster of remarkable sites in
southeast Turkey has been brought into
the limelight in recent years. Although
Robert Braidwood and Halet ambel
began the excavations at ayn Tepesi
in the 1960s, the extraordinary, nondomestic buildings in the centre of the
settlement only began to be brought into
focus in the 1990s (zdogan 1995; 1999;
zdogan & zdogan 1990). Another
small settlement, Neval ori, was excavated before being drowned by the lake
behind a major dam. It had monumental domestic architecture like ayn
Tepes, but attention has focused on
the subterranean cult-building at the
centre of the settlement (Hauptmann
1993, 1999). The most remarkable of
all the sites, however, is Gbekli Tepe
(Schmidt 1998; 2001; 2003; 2004; 2005a;
2005b).
17

Structured settlements
and central,
communal buildings
are not confined
to Syria. A cluster of
remarkable sites in
southeast Turkey has
been brought into the
limelight in recent years.

17

Gbekli Tepe is a mound about 300 m

in diameter and more than 15 m high,
situated on a prominent ridge in the
limestone hills that overlook the plain of
Harran, near Urfa. It is not a settlement
mound in the normal sense, for it has
(so far) produced no domestic houses
or anything that resembles the normal
stratigraphic accumulation of surfaces
and occupation debris. The matrix of the
mound seems to be a vast accumulation
Illustration by of deliberately deposited broken stone
Raina Stebelsky debris with an admixture of occupation debris, including large amounts of
chipped stone, considerable amounts
of animal bone and a small amount of
carbonised plant materials. Since the
mound is composed of a great amount
of domestic refuse, but is not a settlement site itself, it would be natural to
look for settlement around the mound.
All around the mound there are features
cut into the bedrock, such as posthole
patterns, cisterns (?), large cylindrical
features and quarries from which stone
monoliths have been cut, and dense
carpets of chipped stone. But these features do not constitute a settlement,
and extensive survey work has found
none closer than about 15 km, under the
centre of the old city of Urfa (Yeni Yol
- Bucak & Schmidt 2003; elik 2000a).
The mound seems to be full of subterranean structures, excavated to depths
between 2 and 5 m into the matrix, and
formed by massive, dry-stone retaining
walls. Every structure so far excavated
has been found to have been deliberately and completely refilled with the stony
matrix material at the end of its life.
Geophysical survey indicates that there
are more than a dozen further subterra-

Figure 2:
The raised reliefs of
the Steinzeit-Tempel
(stone age temple)
at Gbekli Tepe are
almost entirely of wild
(and dangerous) animals,
large birds, snakes, lizards,
and scorpions.

18

18

nean structures just below the surface of

the mound. The latest structures, dating
to the later aceramic Neolithic, similar
in date, therefore, to the Neval ori
and ayn Tepes structures, contain
the smallest monoliths with the least
amount of figurative decoration. The
earlier structures are larger, sub-circular,
and contain more monoliths that are
themselves much larger (up to 5 m tall)
and more elaborately carved. In each
enclosure, there is an opposed pair of
T-shaped limestone monoliths, and the
places where they were quarried can be
seen on the eroded limestone surfaces
all around the mound itself. In the earlier structures, more of the monoliths
were erected around the perimeter of
the enclosure, set at right angles to
the retaining wall with their bases in a
stone-built bench (fig.2). Some of the
early structures can be seen to have been
rebuilt. Their second form was erected
within the earlier retaining wall, the
space between the old and the new walls
being filled with broken stone debris.
Some of the T-shaped monoliths seem to
have been re-sited, their sculptured animals partly or completely hidden where
they have been built into (or perhaps
embodied within) a retaining wall. As at
Neval ori, there are other sculptured
stones that have been found where they
were dumped. The T-shaped monoliths
were intended to be anthropomorphic,
as they share the same features as those
from Neval ori, and one or two have
arms and hands carved in very low relief.
The raised relief sculpted onto the surfaces of the monoliths is almost entirely
of wild (and dangerous) animals, large
birds, snakes, lizards, and scorpions.
How Gbekli Tepe is related to the
communities that built it and made its
sculpted monoliths is as yet unknown.
Schmidt (2003; 2005a; 2005b) has begun
to think of the site as a cult centre that
is in some sense related to the economic
geographers notion of a central place.
He has also introduced to his discussion
reference to the thinking of the influential urban theorist Lewis Mumford
(1961), who speculated that the original
cities arose where a permanent settlement was established around a central
shrine. While we have so few cult centres like Gbekli Tepe, and while we still
know relatively little about the unique
site and its functioning, it is impos-

sible to define its role in the settlement

landscape which is one that is very
unfamiliar to us, whether from personal
experience of reading in the anthropological literature. Setting those difficulties aside, we can at least appreciate that
the sites mentioned (and Schmidt 2005b
is careful to list them more thoroughly,
document what has been reported, and
give the appropriate publication details)
give prominent and central positions
to buildings of elaborate architectural
design, with which are associated clear
indications of imagery and symbolism,
whether in visual form or in the shape of
use for ritual activities.
In a paper parallel to Schmidts
(2005b), Rollefson (2005) briefly reviews
the evidence for ritual architecture and
ritual centres in the southern Levant,
fortunately relieving this author of the
need to document further the explosion
of symbolic architecture that began in
the final Epipalaeolithic, and continued
through the aceramic Neolithic in that
region. Rollefson attributes the growth
of ritual activity to population increase
both within individual settlements and
in the overall density of human population within the landscape. He subscribes
to the theory of religion as the social
glue holding societies together.
While there is general agreement nowadays that what Cauvin (1994) called la
rvolution des symboles occurred at the
beginning of the Holocene (presaged, of
course, in the Epi-palaeolithic period),
there is a poor ability to explain why
it should have happened then and not
earlier. In what follows, I shall be turning Rollefsons evolutionary perspective
on its head. He takes a classic ecological
line, supposing that larger co-resident
communities and higher population density in general required adaptations that
took the form of socio-cultural mechanisms which served as the sociological
glue holding together the larger, more
stressed communities of the aceramic Neolithic period. In his preliminary
discussion of the deficiencies of most
theories of religion, Pascal Boyer simply
undermines the social glue theory
(Boyer 2001: 26-8). I argue that co-evolutionary processes developed human
cognition and culture towards a fully
symbolic stage of culture, and that that
opened the way for large-scale, permanently co-resident communities to oper-

ate within wide-area networks. Having

first faced the challenge of devising new
ways to conceptualize their condition as
members of sedentary, village communities in symbolic form, these hunter-gatherers quickly turned to the exploration
of the culturally rich possibilities of this
new way of life. Following the leads of
Ian Hodder (1990) and Peter Wilson
(1988), we may call the result of this coevolutionary process in southwest Asia
domestication.
Domestication
In his book The Domestication of the
Human Species, based on a cross-cultural
knowledge of ethnographically documented hunter-gatherers, the anthropologist Peter Wilson argued for a clear
difference between the traditional,
small-scale, mobile hunter-gatherer band
societies and sedentary hunter-gatherer
societies, who live in permanent buildings in village societies. Wilson called
the former type the open society,
while sedentary hunter-gatherer societies, like village-farming societies, are
called domesticated societies (Wilson
1988). He considered domestication
in the same sort of terms as Ian Hodder
(1990) in his book The Domestication
of Europe: Structure and Contingency in
Neolithic Societies. Domestication is the
effect of living in houses, living in villages. In open societies people were
constantly aware of each other within
the group. He argued that domestication
was a significant event in human evolution because it challenged that natural,
evolved dependence on paying constant
attention to one another. On the other
hand, living in houses grouped in villages offered the potential for structuring peoples thinking.
Wilson argues that the way that we
conduct ourselves is as much in response
to sensory inputs as a matter of instincts;
thus the adoption of houses and village
life domestication involved new
responses and new thinking, in terms of
the development of structure in social
life, the elaboration of thinking about
structure in the world, and ways of signifying links between structure in domestic
life and structure in the world. Wilsons
analysis of modern, mobile hunter-gatherers shows that they rely on uninterrupted and unimpeded attention, so that
each member of the group is constantly
19

Domestication is
the effect of
living in houses,
living in villages.
In open societies
people were constantly
aware of each other
within the group.

19

The essence of
Donalds hypothesis
is that the
modern human mind
has evolved
further and further
from the primate mind
by means of a series
of three major
adaptations,
each of which was
driven by
the emergence of a new
representational system.

aware of the whereabouts of the others

and what they are doing. These open
societies are marked by an emphasis
on focus (Wilson 1988: 31), while
sedentary domesticated societies are
distinguished by an emphasis on the
boundary (Wilson 1988: 57-8). Wilson
writes : Architecture is a materialization of structure, and the adoption of
architecture as a permanent feature of
life introduces spatial organization and
allocation as an ordering visual dimension (Wilson 1988: 61). It was natural
for domesticated societies to form analogues between their built environment
and community, between house and
household, and between the built environment that they create and inhabit
and the world in which they live. Wilson
introduces frequent examples of sedentary societies for whom the structure of
their villages and their houses expresses
the structure of their social lives. And,
like other anthropologists, Wilson cites
examples of sedentary societies whose
ideas about the organization of the cosmos are modelled in the structuring of
their houses and their settlement. In
another recent publication, I have gone
on to mention some of the many writers
and thinkers who have noted the significance of the architecture of the house in
the representation of ideas about the
structure of the world (Watkins 2003).
However, neither Wilson nor Hodder
can tell us why the emergence of domestication occurred when it did, around the
end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene periods. For that,
we need to turn to overtly evolutionary theories concerning the evolution of
human cognition and culture.
The co-evolution of mind and culture
The thesis that I want to try and build is
that the cognitive and cultural evolution
of modern humans, Homo sapiens, had
reached a stage where it could readily be
triggered into the development of powerful new forms of symbolic representation in material form. There are several
cognitive psychologists, linguists and
neuro-scientists working on the general
idea of cognitive and cultural co-evolution a process in which human minds/
brains were stimulated into new ways
of thinking and representing ideas in a
positive feedback loop where human
minds develop new cultural media that

20

20

in turn engender new ways for minds

to think. The most obvious examples
of such cognitive-cultural co-evolutionary revolutions are the emergence of a
full, modern language capacity, and the
development of writing.
Like a number of archaeologists, I
have found Merlin Donalds ideas and
arguments extremely stimulating and
very exciting (Donald 1991; 1998; 2001).
The essence of Donalds hypothesis
is that the modern human mind has
evolved further and further from the
primate mind by means of a series of
three major adaptations, each of which
was driven by the emergence of a new
representational system (Donald 1991,
conveniently prcised in Donald 1998).
Each of these new representational systems was added to the already existing
faculties: one did not supplant or replace
another.
The first representational system to
emerge is labelled by Donald mimetic
culture, dependent on mimesis, or nonverbal action-modelling involving gesture including vocal gesturing, non-verbal communication, and shared attention. It is very difficult for us to imagine;
it was limited and slow, but Donald is
emphatic that it constituted the prototype of human culture, and facilitated
some degree of information storage and
transmission.
Language, in the form in which we
know it around our world, was the second of the modes of representation.
Language, Donald explains, gives us
humans a powerful means of explicit recall from memory, the ability to
address and organize knowledge, and
to make it accessible to further reflection. As I have sought to emphasise
elsewhere (Watkins 2003; 2004; 2005; in
press a; in press b), taking my cue from
Terence Deacons book, The Symbolic
Species (Deacon 1997), and as Donald
also emphasises, full modern language
involves much more than the formation of a lexicon, or the emergence of
the physical ability to speak as modern
speakers do. Crucially, language implies
a facility with symbolic representation. If
modern humans have had the cognitive
and cultural capacity to manage the system of symbolic representation that we
call language, they have had the potential to devise other modes of symbolic
representation, too. The early archaeo-

logical indications of that capacity for

symbolic representation in material form
and action antedate the first figurative
representations of the European Upper
Palaeolithic; they are found associated
with the newly emerged Homo sapiens in
Africa (DErrico et al. 2003).
However, the greatest change in
human culture has been what Donald
refers to as the emergence of theoretic
culture, a mode that is supported by
systems of external symbolic storage.
And this most recent transformation of
culture has found its full realization in
the use of alphabetic writing systems.
Ideas and information encapsulated in
external symbolic storage systems (think
of a university library, with shelves full
of archaeological journals and all the
varied monographs) are accessible to
any of us, at any time. We may criticize
or reformulate the information that we
find, and add to it with our own publications for others to synthesise in their
turn. It should not be hard for us to recognize that, while the genetic makeup
of our brains may not have changed
over the last few generations, centuries
or millennia, the ability to link to an
accumulating external memory store has
afforded our minds cognitive powers
that would not otherwise have been
possible. Donald speaks of our minds as
hybrid minds, dependent on their ability
to access external symbolic information.
The emergence of external symbolic
storage systems is a cultural and not a
biological phenomenon, and it changes
the cognitive working of the human
mind, enabling us to evoke qualitatively
new types of representation.
In his more recent book (A Mind So Rare:
The Evolution of Human Consciousness),
Donald expands on the ideas of brainculture co-evolution (Donald 2001).
He discusses at length the process of
deep enculturation in human learning and the development of individual consciousness. Deep enculturation
describes the way that a fully symbolic
cultural environment directly affects the
way that major parts of what Donald
calls the executive brain develop from
infancy. Symbolic culture effectively
wires up functional subsystems in the
brain that would not otherwise exist.
If these ideas have huge implications
for the ways that the minds of people
today have learned to operate in the very

different cultural environments within

which they developed, they have equally significant implications for the ways
that the minds of prehistoric people
developed within prehistoric cultural
environments. Following Donalds logic,
cultures that were fully symbolic and
minds that operated within fully symbolic cultural contexts are quite different
from less than fully symbolic cultures
and less than fully symbolically literate
minds. As members of todays Western
archaeological community, it is easy to
appreciate the importance of the written word as a mode of external symbolic
storage. Because of our education and
upbringing with its emphasis on literacy
and the printed word, it is less easy for
us to appreciate the role of other, nonverbal, non-literate modes of symbolic
representation. Yet, as archaeologists, we
ought to be aware of the importance of
both portable artefacts and fixed constructions and buildings as modes of
symbolic representation in other cultures (and, indeed, in our own cultures).
I take a similar view to that articulated by Colin Renfrew in response
to Donalds view of external symbolic
storage and writing (Renfrew 1998). On
the one hand, Renfrew rejected the
idea of an Upper Palaeolithic revolution
as the beginning of human modernity
(Renfrew 1996) and, on the other hand,
he thought that Donalds concern with
alphabetic writing as the beginning of
truly effective external symbolic storage
missed a significant earlier revolution.
Renfrew emphasised the potential of
non-verbal, non-literate symbolic culture in constituting modes of symbolic
storage and transmission several millennia earlier than the first, non-alphabetic
writing systems. In his recent writing, he
has developed the view that fully symbolic material culture, emerging before
the first writing systems, constitutes a
further significant stage in human cultural and cognitive evolution (Renfrew
2003), and he calls these ideas a theory
of material engagement (Renfrew 2004).
The idea that I wish to develop here and
in other recent publications is that architecture is a specially powerful mode of
external symbolic storage, that this mode
of symbolic representation in architectural form was first realised at the end
of the Epipalaeolithic and the beginning
of the Neolithic in southwest Asia, and
21

This geometric
approach to houses,
combining curvilinear
and straight lines,
should be emphasized,
since it became
part of a tradition,
as possibly evidenced
by later buildings
in Mureybet and
Jerf al-Ahmar.

21

that this realization of the potential of

symbolic material culture accounts for
the precocity of southwest Asia from this
time on for several thousand years.
The built environment as external
symbolic storage network
The emergence of harvesting, food storage, and sedentary life in village communities came at a perfect time to coincide with human cognitive and cultural
evolution. Communities in southwest
Asia began to use material culture in
the same way that they used language.
Language is differential, rather than referential. The signs (words) take meaning from their syntactic and semantic
context, in relation to one another. The
same may be said for architecture. The
built environment of the village offered
an arena within which abstract ideas
about the structure of the community,
the relationship of the community with
their world, and even the structure of
that world could be articulated in their
buildings, and the relationship of buildings to one another. Further, individual buildings constituted arenas within
which much more could be symbolically
constructed in their fittings and fixtures,
and in the rituals conducted within
them. In building their houses and villages, they were framing concepts and
constructing in symbolic form the most
significant aspects of their world and
their lives. For us, architecture and the
built environment constitute our way
of living; architecture materializes our
social institutions, frames our perceptions and forms the arena within which
social and other relations are played out.
Significantly, it provides the framework
for the deep enculturation of human
infants. Growing up in an architecturally
expressive environment, surrounded
by artefacts with symbolic values, and
guided by parents and other seniors who
already know this world, makes us who
we are.
Anthropologists, architects and social
thinkers believe that architecture serves
as a structuring device in the thinking of contemporary or recent societies.
That most influential of anthropological
theoreticians, Lvi-Strauss, has written
extensively on the house as a social
form, proposing house-based societies
socits maison as a category of
social organization, distinct from societ22

22

ies based in kinship, or hierarchically

organized societies based on class, status
or power. Lvi-Strauss was impressed
by the Annaliste historian Georges
Duby, who wrote about the institution
of noble houses in medieval France.
Indeed, house-based societies are to be
found widely in the ethnographic literature (I have written more fully on this
subject elsewhere; see Watkins 2003).
And we may note that post-structuralist
and social thinkers such as Bourdieu,
Derrida and Giddens also say that the
house serves as a structuring instrument.
We are clearly in good company.
However widely found the examples
of societies, architects, anthropologists,
or social thinkers who use the architecture of the house as a mode of structuring their thought or ideas, we cannot
assume that contemporary cultural experience can be universalised. What we are
seeing at the end of the Epipalaeolithic
and the beginning of the Neolithic periods of southwest Asia is the emergence
of a new, fully modern mode of cognitive
and cultural representation.
What I have sought to suggest is that
human cognitive and cultural evolution had reached a point in the final
Palaeolithic where external symbolic
storage networks became possible. In
southwest Asia, where dependence
on stored harvests and the trend to
sedentism happened to evolve in the
Epipalaeolithic, house-building and
life in villages were turned into what
we know as architecture and the richly
meaningful world of the built environment. The new way of life was dramatically different from the whole of
human experience living in small-scale,
mobile, hunter-gatherer groups of fluid
membership. Living in relatively largescale, permanently co-resident communities within a tightly drawn territory,
as Wilson (1988) suggested, presented
challenges but also opportunities.
The primary challenge was that of
constructing a new sense of community
based not only on kinship but also on coresidence. At the same time, the villagecommunity needed to be understood
in the context of its neighbouring communities. The anthropologist, Anthony
Cohen, has worked for many years on
the notion of community and how communities are formed, maintained, and
seen by their members and non-mem-

bers. In a small book of primary impor- co-resident groups of several hundred or

tance, Cohen described community as: several thousand people in permanent
settlements. Once the challenge of the
that entity to which one belongs,
symbolic construction of community had
greater than kinship but more immebeen met, the opportunities offered by
diate than the abstraction we call
the new facility with symbolic culture
society. It is the arena in which
could be explored
people acquire their most fundamenThe power of the built environment
tal and most substantial experience
resides in the fact that as we can appreof social life outside the confines of
ciate people live within it: it is not an
the home... At the risk of substituting
optional extra, like a library, that one
one indefinable category for another,
can consult when one wants. We inhabit
we could say it is where one acquires
the symbolic world of architecture. It
culture. (Cohen 1985: 15)
allows us to construct and read meanings at many levels and of many kinds. It
Cohen shows how communities are allows us to construct environments that
symbolically constructed and main- enrich other forms of dramatic symboltained through the manipulation of their ism played out within them. Here I am
symbols in the minds of their members thinking particularly of ritual and drama.
(Cohen 1985: 15). The symbolic con- I am therefore arguing that the first
struction of community involves great sedentary hunter-gatherers and farmcognitive and cultural complexity. The ers of southwest Asia recognized the
construct of community became possible potential of the built environment as
for humans only with the emergence of a powerful cultural system of external
minds that were capable of operating in symbolic storage and reference. In the
terms of symbolic culture. This capacity early Neolithic they were literally conto build and maintain communities that structing new worlds of the imagination
were larger than the circle of immedi- that they could inhabit and in which
ate kin was necessary for the ability of their children grew up in a more powerearly Neolithic groups to live together, ful environment for enculturation than
for the first time in human history, in Homo sapiens had ever known.

23

23

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