Reconstruction
At Tell es-Sultan, beside the perennial ‘Ain es-Sultan spring, a cluster of mud-brick houses became one of the southern Levant’s largest early permanent settlements. Its clearest monumental phase belongs to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A: by roughly 8300 BCE residents had built a massive stone wall, rock-cut ditch, and tower more than 8.5 meters high. These structures required planned labor beyond an individual household. Their purpose is disputed: defense, flood control, communal display, and ritual or calendrical meanings have all been proposed, but the masonry itself directly demonstrates coordination.
Food made such permanence possible. Charred grains and plant impressions from levels culturally assigned to the late PPNA include einkorn, emmer, and barley; lentils and other pulses also occur in Jericho’s Neolithic botanical record. Yet the chronology matters. Reassessment places key “domestic cereal” samples around the middle of the ninth millennium BCE, near the PPNA–PPNB transition, rather than at the settlement’s earliest occupation. The safest reconstruction is therefore gradual cultivation and selection of cereals and legumes, alongside continued gathering and hunting, not an abrupt fully agricultural economy from 9600 BCE. Domestic sheep and goats are not clearly evidenced in the PPNA; they appear in succeeding PPNB levels.
Food was processed without pottery. Ground-stone assemblages from PPNA settlements, including Jericho, show pounding and grinding; hearths and fixed cup-hole stones indicate repeated household preparation. Grain could be dehusked, crushed into meal, and cooked as gruel or dough-like foods, but no surviving Jericho recipe establishes a particular dish. Small stone bins and large circular mud installations near the tower were interpreted as storage features. That interpretation is plausible rather than certain, but regional PPNA granaries show that communities were developing effective ways to hold cereals across seasons, protect seed stock, and buffer shortages.
Jericho’s significance lies in the combination of water, concentrated residence, plant management, storage, and collective construction. Estimates based on its roughly 2.5-hectare PPNA footprint range from a few hundred people to more than 700, and such figures remain model-dependent. Recent isotope work on PPN teeth found most sampled individuals compatible with local residence, supporting a largely stable community while not proving that everyone was sedentary.
Its defensible connection to food today is not a named recipe but a food-system pattern: cereal cultivation, pulse use, grinding grain into meal, planned storage, and cooperation around water and harvests. Wheat, barley, and lentils remain foundational foods across West Asia, although no continuous culinary lineage can be traced from Jericho’s prehistoric meals to any single modern dish.
Historical context
The Younger Dryas cold interval had recently ended and the warmer early Holocene was reshaping vegetation and water availability across Southwest Asia. Communities from the Jordan Valley to the Euphrates were experimenting with longer residence, cultivation of morphologically wild cereals, storage, and increasingly substantial architecture. Jericho’s dependable spring supported an unusually large settlement in an arid valley. Its PPNA occupation covered approximately 2.5 hectares; demographic models suggest hundreds of residents, but estimates vary greatly. Obsidian reaching the southern Levant from Anatolian sources also shows that exchange networks extended hundreds of kilometers before pottery, cities, writing, or metal tools.
Evidence
Archaeological
StrongExcavation directly documents mud-brick buildings, a substantial stone wall, a rock-cut ditch, and the surviving stone tower with an internal staircase.
Archaeobotanical
ModerateCharred remains and plant impressions support the presence of wheat, barley, lentils, and other cultivated or managed plants, but early excavations did not recover or record botanical material as systematically as modern projects.
Zooarchaeological
ModerateAvailable faunal evidence supports continued hunting and does not clearly establish domestic livestock in PPNA Jericho; domesticated sheep and goats are associated more securely with succeeding PPNB levels.
Food identification
ModerateCereal and pulse taxa can be identified, but their proportions in the diet and their status as gathered, cultivated, or fully domesticated varied through time and cannot always be resolved from the surviving material.
Dating
ModerateThe broad Pre-Pottery Neolithic sequence is well established, and the wall and tower are commonly placed around 8300 BCE. Exact correlations among older excavation phases, cultural labels, and calibrated radiocarbon dates remain complicated.
Preparation method
ProbableGround-stone tools, hearths, and processing installations support pounding and grinding plant foods. Gruels, doughs, or bread-like products are reasonable reconstructions, not directly identified Jericho recipes.
Geographic attribution
StrongThe remains are securely located at Tell es-Sultan beside ‘Ain es-Sultan in the Jordan Valley, northwest of modern Jericho.
Historical interpretation
InterpretiveThe tower and wall demonstrate organized communal labor, but their specific functions—as defenses, flood barriers, communal monuments, or ritual structures—remain disputed.
Sources
- 1.Xiaoran Wang, Baoshuai Zhang, Yufeng Sun, et al. (2023). Isotopic and proteomic evidence for communal stability at Pre-Pottery Neolithic Jericho in the Southern Levant. Scientific Reports 13, 16360. doi:10.1038/s41598-023-43549-1Scientific literature
- 2.Sue Colledge, James Conolly, and Stephen Shennan (2004). Archaeobotanical Evidence for the Spread of Farming in the Eastern Mediterranean. Current Anthropology 45(S4), S35–S58. doi:10.1086/422086Scientific literature
- 3.Ian Kuijt and Bill Finlayson (2009). Evidence for food storage and predomestication granaries 11,000 years ago in the Jordan Valley. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106(27), 10966–10970. doi:10.1073/pnas.0812764106Scientific literature
- 4.Katherine I. Wright (2000). The Social Origins of Cooking and Dining in Early Villages of Western Asia. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 66, 89–121. doi:10.1017/S0079497X0000178XScientific literature
- 5.Ian Kuijt (2000). People and Space in Early Agricultural Villages: Exploring Daily Lives, Community Size, and Architecture in the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 19(1), 75–102. doi:10.1006/jaar.1999.0352Scientific literature
- 6.Lorenzo Nigro (2023). The plants of Jericho. The earliest cultivars between symbiosis and domestication. Annali di Botanica 13, 69–76. doi:10.13133/2239-3129/18125Modern synthesis
- 7.UNESCO World Heritage Centre (2023). Ancient Jericho/Tell es-Sultan. World Heritage List. whc.unesco.org/en/list/1687Modern synthesis
Limitations
- moderatedate
The 9600–7000 BCE range combines multiple occupational and cultural phases. The famous wall and tower are dated much more narrowly, commonly to roughly 8300 BCE, and should not be implied to characterize the entire interval.
- minordescription
The wall and tower directly demonstrate communal construction, not cultivation or food storage by themselves. Cultivation is supported separately by archaeobotanical evidence, while some proposed Jericho storage installations remain interpretive rather than unequivocal.
