Buildings with corners have a much deeper history than we thought, adding an unexpected twist to a curious architectural mystery from the dawn of village life.
Archaeologists have long been aware of a global trend in early architecture. From south-west Asia to the Americas, the very earliest settlements typically contained buildings with a round or oval-shaped ground plan. Then, usually a few thousand years later, these apparently went out of fashion, becoming.
But an analysis of early buildings in south-west Asia – home to the oldest settlements in the world – complicates things. “The round to rectangular [trend] isn’t as straightforward as traditionally thought,” says at Israel’s Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Goldgeier says archaeologists have a tendency to oversimplify things when describing building shape, which means even structures with an irregular shape may be classified in a qualitative sense as either round or rectangular. With colleagues, she has instead used a quantitative approach to analyse the shape of 118 early buildings at 23 sites in south-west Asia, the oldest of which date back about 14,000 years and the youngest about 10,000 years.
The analysis revealed that the oldest buildings weren’t universally round. Instead, they came in a variety of shapes including teardrops, D-shapes and irregular pentagons – and some contained 90-degree corners. The most ancient of these structures were built by a people known as the Natufians about 12,500 to 12,000 years ago. This means their architects were incorporating 90-degree corners into buildings about 2000 years before rectangular structures became the dominant style in the region.
at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, isn’t fully convinced by the conclusion. He points out that many Natufian buildings were in caves rather than in the open air. Consequently, their architects often incorporated cave walls into their buildings. “If you happen to have a corner [in the cave wall] you’re going to use it,” says Kuijt.
But Goldgeier disagrees that this explains the early appearance of corners. “While there are some Natufian structures which are built in caves, they are not the rule,” she says.
The broader question is why the trend from round to rectangular buildings exists at all. “It’s something that I have sat down and talked about with many different people,” says Kuijt.
“It’s likely that the reasons are multiple and complex,” says Goldgeier, suggesting it is difficult to explain the trend even in one region, let alone globally.
But Kuijt thinks we can at least speculate on the factors involved, and one in particular strikes him as important: rectangular buildings may just be more efficient and economical to construct than round ones. For instance, two adjoining rectangular buildings can easily share a wall, but round buildings can’t. “The moment you go with rectilinear forms, the organisation and construction of space is in some ways simpler,” he says.
As such, incorporating 90-degree corners into buildings could be seen as a small step towards improving the efficiency of architectural design. But given that Natufians never constructed rectangular buildings with shared walls, they may have failed to appreciate the potential value of corners.
Archaeological Research in Asia
