-1 101 Z Jericho was first occupied around 9300 BC, during the Natufian period, by people who lived on wild foods including barley and emmer wheat. Clay floors with raised edges built of clay lumps may have been the base for tents made of skins and branches. One walled clay platform is thought to have been a shrine.
# Earliest settlement
1 102 B From 7000 BC rectangular houses were built: small rooms flanking a courtyard with a central hearth, for cooking, and storage bins. The villagers were now keeping goats and perhaps sheep, although they still hunted too. Trade was important by this time, exporting products of the nearby Dead Sea - salt, bitumen and sulphur.
# PPNB
2 101 x Jericho was first occupied around 9300 BC, during the Natufian period, by people who lived on wild foods including barley and emmer wheat. Clay floors with raised edges built of clay lumps may have been the base for tents made of skins and branches. One walled clay platform is thought to have been a shrine.
# Earliest settlement
3 102 D During the early Neolithic period (PPNA), the settlement was surrounded by a huge stone wall with an entrance on the west. Later a massive ditch was added, 32 ft wide (9.5m). These may have protected the settlement from flooding or attackers - though there is no evidence of conflict at the time.
# Wall
4 101 x Jericho was ideally situated by a perennial spring near wooded slopes where the settlement's inhabitants could find game and edible plants like nuts and seeds. The spring not only provided drinking water but also watered a large area of natural vegetation. It was an excellent place to plant crops, which the villagers began doing after 8000 BC.
# Spring
5 102 I Jericho was abandoned about 6000 BC. Around 5000 BC newcomers using pottery settled here. At first relatively crude, their pottery soon became technically more sophisticated. Some was attractively decorated with zigzags in red paint. Initially the villagers lived in tents and pit houses, but later they built stone-walled houses.
# Pottery Neolithic
6 101 x Many later Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPNB) houses contained human remains. Beneath the floor of this house were buried about forty skeletons, mainly without their skulls which were displayed within the house, probably in connection with ancestor worship. On many, features had been modelled in clay, the empty eye sockets being filled with shells.
# Skulls
7 102 E Immediately inside the wall's gateway was an enormous tower. A doorway at its foot led into an internal stone staircase leading up to the roof. Probably this was a watchtower, strategically placed at the highest point in the settlement to command a view out over the surrounding countryside.
# Tower.
9 102 G Two later Pre-pottery Neolithic structures have tentatively been identified as shrines. In one a niche held a piece of basalt set on a pedestal, perhaps an early version of the stelae (carved monoliths) representing the god that are familiar from later Palestine. The other had in its centre a basin surrounded by signs of burning.
# PPNB shrines
10 102 A After 8500 BC Jericho started to expand enormously, the settlement eventually housing a population of perhaps 1,500 people. They now cultivated cereals and lived in more permanent houses. A porch opened onto a staircase leading down into a partially underground hut with plastered floor and mudbrick walls supporting the roof.
