After dark, we arrived at a settlement of mud-brick huts in the jungle.
The primary focus of the volume is on the archaeological investigations undertaken at Jeitun, a small Neolithic settlement of rectangular mud-brick houses located at the junction of the Kopetdag piedmont and the Karakum desert, near modern-day Ashgabat in Turkmenistan.
The people of that area, the archaeologists say, built oasis settlements with imposing mud-brick buildings and fortifications.
Their mud-brick house in Charahee Sarsabzi, an informal settlement camp in Kabul, has only a plastic sheet for a roof.
Until recently, archaeologists assumed that the stone and mud-brick buildings that made up these small settlements were the houses of the first farmers, who had begun to give up the hunting and gathering lifestyle.
The settlement, she said, does not appear to have the mud-brick permanence of other ancient Middle East sites.
There, a settlement of copper-working people lived in stone or mud-brick huts and grew barley.
The Ghassulian stage was characterized by small settlements of farming peoples, immigrants from the north, who built mud-brick, trapezoid-shaped houses or underground dwellings and created remarkable polychrome wall paintings.
He began with a meticulous study of old Arab settlements, including the ancient citadel of Aleppo in Syria and the mud-brick apartment towers of Shibam in Yemen, which date from the 16th century.
Among the occupation sequence of the site with well-defined architectural phases, the Late PPNB settlement (late 8th to early 7th millennium cal. BC) is characterized by an extensive mud-brick architecture, which comprises large multi-roomed rectangular buildings and gypsum-plastered floors.
