page_title: History of construction
section_title: Neolithic construction
hierarchical_section_title: History of construction / Chronological development / Neolithic construction
caption_attribution_description: Pfahlbaumuseum Unteruhldingen, Uhldingen-Mühlhofen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany Deutsch: Ringpalisade mit Wehrgang des steinzeitlichen Dorfs „Sipplingen“.
context_page_description: The history of construction overlaps many other fields like structural engineering and relies on other branches of science like archaeology, history and architecture to investigate how the builders lived and recorded their accomplishments. Those fields allow us to analyse constructed buildings and other structures built since prehistory, the tools used and the different uses of building materials.
  History of building is evolving by different trends in time, marked by few key principles: durability of the materials used, the increasing of height and span, the degree of control exercised over the interior environment and finally the energy available to the construction process.
context_section_description: The Neolithic, also known as the "New Stone Age", was a time period roughly from 9000 BC to 5000 BC named because it was the last period of the age before wood working began. The tools available were made from natural materials including bone, hide, stone, wood, grasses, animal fibers, and the use of water. These tools were used by people to cut such as with the hand axe, chopper, adze, and celt. Also to scrape, chop such as with a flake tool, pound, pierce, roll, pull, leaver, and carry.
  Building materials included bones such as mammoth ribs, hide, stone, metal, bark, bamboo, clay, lime plaster, and more. For example, the first bridges made by humans were probably just wooden logs placed across a stream and later timber trackways. In addition to living in caves and rock shelters, the first buildings were simple shelters, tents like the Inuit's tupiq, and huts sometimes built as pit-houses meant to suit the basic needs of protection from the elements and sometimes as fortifications for safety such as the crannog. Built self-sufficiently by their inhabitants rather than by specialist builders, using locally available materials and traditional designs and methods which together are called vernacular architecture.
  The very simplest shelters, tents, leave no traces. Because of this, what little we can say about very early construction is mostly conjecture and based on what we know about the way nomadic hunter-gatherers and herdsmen in remote areas build shelters today. The absence of metal tools placed limitations on the materials that could be worked, but it was still possible to build quite elaborate stone structures with ingenuity using dry stone walling techniques such as at Skara Brae in Scotland, Europe's most complete Neolithic village. The first mud bricks, formed with the hands rather than wooden moulds, belong to the Neolithic period and were found in Jericho. One of the largest structures of this period was the Neolithic long house. In all cases of timber framed and log structures in these very early cultures, only the very lowest parts of the walls and post holes are unearthed in archaeological excavations, making reconstruction of the upper parts of these buildings largely conjectural.
  Neolithic architecture ranges from the tent to the megalith (an arrangement of large stones) and rock-cut architecture which are frequently temples, tombs, and dwellings. The most remarkable Neolithic structure in Western Europe is the iconic megalith known as Stonehenge, regarded by some archaeologists as displaying methods of timber construction such as at woodhenge translated into stone, a process known as petrification. The now ruinous remains are of post and lintel construction and include massive sandstone lintels which were located on supporting uprights by means of mortise and tenon joints; the lintels themselves being end-jointed by the use of tongue and groove joints. There is also evidence of prefabrication of the stonework; the symmetrical geometric arrays of stone clearly indicate that the builders of Stonehenge had mastered sophisticated surveying methods. Neolithic villages large enough to have rural and urban features are called proto-cities to distinguish them from cities beginning with Eridu.
caption: A reconstruction of a neolithic fortified village showing a palisade wall and stilt houses at the Pfahlbau Museum Unteruhldingen, Germany.
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