Some Notes on the Reconstruction of PPNB Architecture

Referring to an old proverb – " a picture says more than a thousand words " –, this article should be seen as a comment to the following reconstruction drawings of PPNB architecture from Ba'ja, Basta, and Shkârat Msaied. The PPNB architecture of southern Jordan, especially in the Greater Petra Area, is said to be " well known " from sites like Basta, 'Ain Jammam, es-Sifiya, al-Basît, Ba'ja and Ghwair. But how well do we really know these well preserved structures? We see only parts of very complex buildings, where no outline of a house is really clear, with the possible exception of the main building in Basta, Area B (Nissen et al. 1991; Kinzel 2003). In settlements like Ba'ja, one cannot isolate a single ground plan of a house. What belongs to a house? To reconstruct the full size and volume of a house unit in that context one cannot simply project a ground plan to the vertical dimension. This holds true irrespective of the question of whether or not the PPNB houses were multi-storeyed buildings. In detail, the results from Ba'ja and Basta allow different interpretations of the same situation. Fig. 1 gives an example: a commonly used wall between two " rooms " featuring a support for a ceiling or roof and a wall opening. The following possible interpretations are the first key to understand the character of PPNB architecture: 1) Wall sharing: One-storey buildings, using the roofs as an activity area, but no second storey. The supposed support of a ceiling is perhaps just a result of different building events, adding a new wall on a higher level on top of the lower parts of the wall. An example is Old Basta village. 2) Split level: A building unit uses different levels. A house can use more than one terrace level. Fig. 4 presents an example from the modern village of Rajif. This seems to be the " normal case " in most of the LPPNB sites of southern Jordan. 3) Two-or multi-storeyed houses: The findings connected with the site topography, the architectural preservation , and the room fills, especially in Baja, can be interpreted as complex multi-storeyed building structures. Combining these interpretations, we get a tool to characterize the architecture of different sites. In Basta the wall sharing feature is predominant, with a split-level shaping and a few extreme variations of 3) above. The " …