EARLIEST HOUSES, BUILDINGS, POSSESSIONS AND WOODEN STRUCTURES

FIRST HOMES

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The first houses were thought to be windbreaks made of animals skins stretched over a frame. There is evidence that “Homo Erectus” constructed 50-foot-long branch huts with stone slabs or animal skins for floors.

The oldest recognized buildings in the world are twelve 400,000-year-old huts found in Nice, France in 1960. Uncovered by an excavator preparing to build a new house, the oval shelters ranged from 26 feet to 49 feet in length and were between 13 feet and 20 feet wide. They were built of 3-inch in diameter stakes and braced by a ring of stones. Longer poles were set around the perimeter as supports. The huts had hearths and pebble-lined pits and were defined by stake holes.

Good Websites Archaeology News Report archaeologynewsreport.blogspot.com ; Anthropology.net anthropology.net : archaeologica.org archaeologica.org ; Archaeology in Europe archeurope.com ; Archaeology magazine archaeology.org ; HeritageDaily heritagedaily.com; Livescience livescience.com/

RELATED ARTICLES:
EARLY MODERN HUMAN HOMES, SETTLEMENTS AND POSSESSIONS europe.factsanddetails.com ;
NEANDERTHAL LIFE: CLOTHES, HOMES, LANGUAGE europe.factsanddetails.com ;
HOMO ERECTUS LIFE, STRUCTURES, LANGUAGE, ART AND CULTURE factsanddetails.com

World’s Oldest Door?

In 2010 AP reported, “Archaeologists in the Swiss city of Zurich have unearthed a 5,000-year-old door that may be one of the oldest ever found in Europe. The ancient poplar wood door is "solid and elegant" with well-preserved hinges and a "remarkable" design for holding the boards together, chief archaeologist Niels Bleicher. Using tree rings to determine its age, Bleicher believes the door could have been made in the year 3,063 B.C. — around the time that construction on Britain's world famous Stonehenge monument began. [Source: AP, October 20, 2010]

"The door is very remarkable because of the way the planks were held together," Bleicher told The Associated Press. Harsh climatic conditions at the time meant people had to build solid wood houses that would keep out much of the cold wind blowing across Lake Zurich, and the door would have helped, he said. "It's a clever design that even looks good."

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The door was part of a settlement of so-called "stilt houses" frequently found near lakes about a thousand years after agriculture and animal husbandry were first introduced to the pre-Alpine region. It is similar to another door found in nearby Pfaeffikon, while a third — found in the 19th century and made from one solid piece of wood — is believed to be even older, possibly dating back to 3,700 B.C., said Bleicher.

The latest find was discovered at the dig for a new underground car park for Zurich's opera house. Archaeologists have found traces of at least five Neolithic villages believed to have existed at the site between 3,700 and 2,500 years B.C., including objects such as a flint dagger from what is now Italy and an elaborate hunting bow.

Helmut Schlichtherle, an archaeologist for the conservation department in the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, said finding an intact door was very rare, as usually only the foundations of stilt houses are preserved because they are submerged in water for millennia. Without air, the bacteria and fungi that usually destroy wood in a matter of years can't grow, meaning many lakes and moorlands in Europe are considered archaeological treasure troves.

"Some might say it's only a door, but this is really a great find because it helps us better understand how people built their houses, and what technology they had," he said. Schlichtherle, who wasn't part of the Zurich dig, said over 200 stilt houses have been discovered in southern Germany alone, but to date no doors.

Stone Age Houses Reconstructed Using Bone Tools and Ancient Materials

Stone Age houses have been reconstructed at Butser Ancient Farm in the Hampshire South Downs, England using only tools and techniques used 5,000 years ago such bone chisels, stone axes, wood and thatch. The model for the first house — which is covered with a water-reed thatch that goes from the ground from the roof — was the remains of an actual house found in Berkshire in 2012 dated to around 3,800 B.C. [Source: Dalya Alberge, The Telegraph, April 18, 2021]

“Claire Walton, archaeologist at Butser, told The Telegraph of her astonishment over how efficient the most basic ancient tools proved to be. “People always call it the Stone Age, which is such a misnomer because we discovered that bone makes such a useful tool," Mrs Walton added. "What normally is discovered are the stone tools and hand-axes, and not things like bone chisels. We actually used bone chisels, for example to make holes into which we drove pegs. Bone chisel turned out to be remarkably effective with almost no preparatory work to [it]… That was quite revelatory.”

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Dalya Alberge wrote in The Telegraph,“Replicating the skills of early Neolithic man, the archaeologists used stone hand-axes to shape the timbers and, for more detailed elements — such as a decorative hazel feature above the doorway — they split hazel using a piece of flint. In replicating the ancient peoples' use of natural resources, the archaeologists used a glue extracted from birch trees. They even constructed a window pane from deer hide which, once the fur was removed, became almost translucent. Fish oil made it water-proof.

“One end of the house — which measures 15 meters by 7.4 meters — bears an oak-planked wall, the other is wattle and daub. “The wattle is hazel harvested from the woodlands around us,” Mrs Walton said. “The daub is horse manure. You could use horse or cow. Both nice and stretchy. Mixed with soil, bits of straw and hay.”

“The thatched roof, pictured below, was constructed from hand-cut water-reed. Mrs Walton said: “We thought reed was a good choice because, on a practical level, it was available to us at the time — there has been a terrible shortage of straw for thatching over the last year or two due to terrible harvests... Water-reed also lasts much longer than straw.”

Furniture and Interior of Neolithic Houses

Dalya Alberge wrote in The Telegraph: “Archaeological evidence does not reveal how our Neolithic ancestors decorated their interiors, but Mrs Walton argues that they must have been as aesthetically sensitive to their surroundings as we are today. “If you look at other artefacts that you find in the archaeological record, there are little carved figurines and pieces of woven material," she said. "It’s really obvious that these people didn’t just subsist. They lived and thrived and were creative and artistic.” [Source: Dalya Alberge, The Telegraph, April 18, 2021]

“Whether Stone Age man had furniture is unclear. “Certainly there’s evidence in other parts of the world that they had clay or earth platforms to sit on," Mrs Walton said. "But the geology of where we were wouldn’t necessarily have supported that. So we’ve built some benches… Sometimes we do early Neolithic peoples a disservice by thinking that they sat on the ground on a heap of leaves.”

7500-Year-Old Baskets from Spain

Baskets made of Esparto grass dated to around 7500 B.C. were found in Cueva de los Murciélagos, Spain. They were 9.6 centimeters (3.8 inches) to 13 centimeters (5.1 inches) tall. According to Archaeology magazine: According to magazine: There are very few places on Earth where people can’t find twigs, reeds, blades of grass, or other resources to make a basket — and people always need a way to carry their belongings or food. The archaeological record, then, should include innumerable baskets from countless cultures. But because baskets have generally been made of perishable materials, ancient examples rarely survive. [Source: Jarrett A. Lobell, Archaeology magazine, March/April 2024]

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“Containers made of organic materials are the origin of storage objects,” says archaeologist Francisco Martínez-Sevilla of the University of Alcalá. “Without doubt, such containers must have been made in different parts of the planet at different times — the problem is, they aren’t preserved.” Several remarkable exceptions are the baskets that were discovered in Cueva de los Murciélagos, or Cave of the Bats, in southern Spain.

These baskets were found by miners in the mid-nineteenth century alongside about 30 desiccated corpses. The bodies’ current location is unknown, but they are thought to date to the same period as the baskets, which do not appear to have been used and were likely part of a funeral ritual. At the time the baskets were discovered, many scholars thought they were forgeries. It was not until the 1970s, when researchers dated them to the Neolithic period, about 6,500 years ago, that they were shown not just to be genuine, but also very ancient. Martínez- Sevilla has recently redated the baskets and found that they are even older and are, in fact, the oldest objects made from fibers ever found in Europe.

Craftspeople made the baskets using raw, unprocessed grass they collected in the summer and then left to dry for 20 to 30 days before rehydrating it for about 24 hours to make it pliable. They twined the fibers together to fashion the baskets and decorated them with red and green geometric motifs. “These baskets, and the craftspeople’s expertise, open our minds to the complexity of Mesolithic societies and their technical capabilities,” Martínez-Sevilla says. “Basket weaving involves the transmission of knowledge from one generation to another, and in the cases where they are preserved, baskets allow us to see how knowledge and cultural traditions are passed down.”

Community Buildings in Early Villages

Trevor Watkins of the University of Edinburgh wrote: “At a number of Early Neolithic settlements we know of special purpose buildings, or community buildings; we may think of these buildings as scenarios for communal activities of some sort, and important for the community’s sense of identity. Çayönü, in southeast Turkey, had a succe sion of communal buildings at the centre of the site. Each was rectangular and each was different from the others. Although the houses were based on stone and mud foundations at ground level, the communal buildings seem to have preserved an ancient tradition of being at least partly cut into the ground. The most elaborate of the buildings, the socalled skull building, was repeatedly remodelled and rebuilt, but throughout its long life it had a series of stone-built cells below the floor level which were found to contain large quantities of human bone, and, in one of the cells, a careful arrangement of skulls at one side of the cell and long bones on the opposite side. [Source: Trevor Watkins, University of Edinburgh,“Household, Community and Social Landscape: Maintaining Social Memory in the Early Neolithic of Southwest Asia”, proceedings of the International Workshop, Socio-Environmental Dynamics over the Last 12,000 Years: The Creation of Landscapes II (14th –18th March 2011)” in Kiel January 2012 /+]

“Among the small buildings, at the centre of the early aceramic Neolithic settlement of Jerf el Ahmar, there was a succession of much larger, circular, subterranean structures, which the excavator, on the basis of her analysis of their features, fittings and lifehistory, has called “bâtiments communautaires”. The earliest of these is yet to be described and fully illustrated its successor is already well-documented. It was constructed in the cylinder were lined with two stone walls, the inner of which had vertical wooden posts set within it to support a flat roof. The walls projected above the then ground level.

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"There was no staircase, so it must be supposed that entry was gained by means of a ladder from a doorway in the roof. Within the cavity there were seven cells arranged around about two thirds of the perimeter. Around the rest of the perimeter the floor was constructed as a low platform, separated into two segments; the floor of the central area was at a slightly lower level. None of the cells had interconnecting doorways; one cell, at the centre of the range of cells, had a small hole opening into the central area of the floor. The roof of this complex structure was deliberately dismantled and the structure itself was obliterated at the end of its use-life. The posts were pulled out, the roof was collapsed and burnt, and the cavity that remained was filled in. But the first act in this dramatic closure of the building was to place a human head in a corner, and a decapitated body with limbs spread-eagled in the centre of the floor. /+\

“The village shifted sideways over time, and another communal building was constructed at the centre of the village; it was similar to its predecessors in proportions and overall shape, but quite different in design and therefore how it functioned. Danielle Stordeur describes the earlier buildings as “polyvalent”, arguing that the cells may have been communal food storage facilities, while the building as a whole served as the arena for some kind of ceremonies. The new building was also circular in outline, subterranean, and roofed, but internally it was theatre-in-the-round. Six tree-trunk posts (fir trees from somewhere in the hills of southeastern Turkey, well to the north of Jerf el Ahmar) were set in a ring, and between each pair of posts a stone kerb was set to front a raised area all around the building. The kerb-stones were carved with pendant chevrons in raised relief; and each post had a deep collar made of plaster. Like its predecessors, this communal building was deliberately dismantled and obliterated at the end of its life.” /+\

First Buildings: Community Centers Not Houses?

Michael Balter wrote in Science: “Nearly 12,000 years ago, the world’s first villages began to spring up in the Near East. 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. But the discovery of a large, amphitheater-like building at a site in southern Jordan, reported today, adds to growing evidence that the earliest permanent buildings might not have been homes, but community centers. The find, researchers say, suggests that during the advent of agriculture—a pivotal turning point that prehistorians call the Neolithic Revolution—early farmers may have come together first to engage in communal activities, and only later did they begin living together. “This is definitely one of the most exciting discoveries in recent years associated with the [Neolithic] in the Near East,” says Nigel Goring-Morris, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. [Source: Michael Balter, Science, May 2, 2011 ~]

“Archaeologists have little doubt that the larger villages that crop up after about 10,000 years ago across the Near East—an area that includes modern-day Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and neighboring countries—were residential communities made up of individual family houses. At 9500-year-old Çatalhöyük in Turkey, for example, thousands of people lived in a tight, honeycomb-like cluster of mud-brick homes that they entered through holes in the roof, and hundreds of similar sites have been excavated across the region.~

“But the earliest Neolithic villages, which date to about 11,700 years ago, are much smaller, and include a variety of buildings of different sizes and shapes. At an 11,500 year old site called Jerf el Ahmar in Syria, for example, the entire community apparently used a number of structures, including storehouses and a circular building with a long bench. And at 11,000-year-old Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, researchers have argued that fantastic monolithic stone structures were part of a community ritual center.~

“In a paper published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by Bill Finlayson, director of the Council for British Research in the Levant in London and archaeologist Steven Mithen, an archaeologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, reports the discovery of a large, oval-shaped building at a site in southern Jordan called Wadi Faynan 16 (WF16). Early farmers lived here between between 11,600 and 10,200 years ago, cultivating wild plants such as wild barley, pistachio, and fig trees, and hunting or herding wild goats, cattle, and gazelle.~

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“The structure, designated building 075 was made of mud-brick, with a floor of mud plaster, and measures a whopping (by Neolithic standards) 22 by 19 meters. Its central area is surrounded by a long bench about a meter deep and half a meter high. In parts of the building, there is a second bench above the first one that forms an additional tier of seating. And along the southern side of the building, the lower bench is decorated with a wave pattern incised into the mud-brick. ~

“Thus the structure echoes the architecture of the Jerf el Ahmar community building--but building 075 is about three times larger. The building’s central area also contains a series of stone mortars set into plaster platforms on the floor, which may have been used to grind wild plants. The structure includes a number of post-holes, which the team thinks might have held up a roof that covered at least part of the building. The team also found two other, smaller structures nearby, which it interprets as storehouses for cereals and other food resources.

“The three structures, the team reports, lie within a cluster of other buildings in a 1-hectare site. But none of these other buildings appear to be domestic houses either: Rather, they seem to have served as storehouses or workshops; one building contained green stone beads and seems to have specialized in their manufacture. Finlayson, Mithen, and their colleagues conclude that the evidence from WF16, combined with evidence from other sites, suggests that the earliest villages were not made up of houses, but rather communal structures where people came together to process their wild harvests and possibly also to engage in community performances. “These settlements appear to be all about community and not about emerging households,” the team writes, adding that this “ritualized community activity” might have helped to bring together the work force necessary to harvest the wild crops. ~

“The authors don't speculate on where the farmers lived, and there is no way to be sure. Researchers working at similar sites have surmised that they lived in small camps near the central site, but such open air habitations are very difficult to find and often leave little or no archaeological traces. Archaeologist Trevor Watkins, emeritus at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, says he “agrees strongly” with the authors’ conclusion that the social changes that took place during the transition from hunting and gathering to farming were at least as important as the later economic changes that led to full-blown domestication of plants and animals. But he thinks that it’s still possible that some of the other buildings at WF16 were used as domestic dwellings. Nevertheless, Watkins says, the communal activities at WF16 and other Neolithic sites probably created “powerful bonds of collective identity” in the earliest farmers that kept them together in stable societies “over many generations.”~

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Determining Ancient Inequality Based on House Size

Researchers have traced inequality back more than 11,000 years using house size as measure of wealth. Matthew Shaer wrote in Smithsonian magazine: “Analyzing dwellings in Pompeii and 62 other archaeological sites dating back 11,200 years, a team of experts has ranked the distribution of wealth in those communities. Bottom line: economic disparities increased over the centuries and technology played a role. The findings add to our knowledge of history’s haves and have-nots, an urgent concern as the gulf between the 1 percent of ultra-rich and the rest of us continues to grow. “We wanted to be able to look at the ancient world as a whole and draw connections to today,” says Michael E. Smith, an archaeologist at Arizona State University, who took part in the study. The research is being published in March 2018 in Ten Thousand Years of Inequality, a book edited by Smith and Timothy Kohler of Washington State University. [Source:Matthew Shaer, Smithsonian magazine, March 2018]

“The idea of using house size as a proxy for economic status may not be revolutionary — a palace is bigger than a hovel, after all — but the researchers found a new way to gauge the economy of ancient settlements from structural measurements. For each site they calculated a value known to economists and policy wonks as the Gini coefficient, which quantifies how evenly wealth is distributed. In a population with a Gini coefficient of 0, everyone has the same economic resources; 1 represents maximum disparity. The Gini score of the United States, one of the most unequal countries, is about 0.81, while that of Slovakia is about 0.48.

“How do past societies stack up? Hunter-gatherers, as scholars long hypothesized, tended to be the most equitable. But around 10,200 B.C., societies began to farm the land. Economic disparity edged up: farming enabled families to collect wealth and pass it on. In Europe and Asia, domestication of draft animals beginning around 10,000 years ago let some landowners cultivate ever larger areas, further concentrating wealth. That didn’t happen in the Americas until after Europeans exported that agricultural innovation in the 16th century.

“The more technologically advanced a society was, the researchers say, the less equal it tended to be — a cautionary tale for our increasingly high-tech future. Comparing the size of dwellings at archaeological ruins, researchers found increasing wealth inequality over thousands of years. Technology accelerates the trend, first in the Old World and then in the New. For each site the experts calculated the Gini coefficient, a standard measure of wealth distribution. The gap between rich and poor in the United States is shown for reference.

7,260-Year-Old Czech Well Claimed as World's Oldest Wooden Structure

In 2020, archaeologists claimed that a Neolithic well in the Czech Republic was the “world's oldest manmade timber structure.” “"We have carried out a dendrochronological analysis and confirmed it with radiocarbon dating," said Jaroslav Peska from the Archeological Centre in the eastern Czech city of Olomouc. "The well dates back to 5,256-5,255 B.C.. There is currently no older man-made wooden structure dated by dendrochronology in the world, although this may change in the future," Peska told AFP, . [Source: AFP, Relax News, February 5, 2020]

“Originally about four meters (yards) deep, the well was found in 2018 at the site of a future motorway about 120 kilometers (75 miles) east of the capital Prague. "We dug up a lower wooden part of the well that is 1.4 meters high and which rose to the surface," said Peska.

The CTK news agency reported the well had wooden posts in corners with grooves for planks, a technology that scientists thought had been used much later. The archaeologists removed the well together with soil which is also being tested to give scientists an idea of the environment of the Neolithic era, the last period of the Stone Age. "The well is under conservation now, and when that's done, it will be taken to a museum in (the nearby city of) Pardubice in about two or three years," said Peska

Well-Constructed 7,000-Year-Old Wooden Wells in Germany

Andrew Curry wrote in Archaeology magazine: Researchers in Germany have discovered four wells more than 7,000 years old. The wells, all underground constructions of hewn oak, are evidence that Neolithic inhabitants of central Europe were accomplished carpenters, capable of felling and working trees three feet thick into planks, then carefully fitting them together. One of the wells, found near the town of Altscherbitz, was removed from water-logged soil in a single 70-ton block and transported to Dresden, where archaeologists “excavated” it in a lab. [Source: Andrew Curry, Archaeology magazine, March-April 2013; November-December 2014]

The 7,000-year-old wood-lined well was buried more than six meters (20 feet) underground and preserved for millennia by cold, wet, oxygen-free conditions.. Rengert Elburg, an archaeologist at the Saxon Archaeological Heritage Office in Dresden and his team found the well’s extraordinary state of preservation provided clues on the tools and techniques the ancient woodworkers used. “Analysis revealed that the ancient well-builders constructed tusk mortise and tenon joints, a technique that uses a fitted wedge to lock the pieces in place, in the base frame, with the rest constructed in “log cabin” style. “We know the Romans could do it, but that they were in use 5,000 years earlier really came as a surprise,” said Elburg.

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“The 151 pieces of wood recovered from the wells are also an invaluable source of data for dendrochronologists, who compare tree rings to date artifacts and learn more about past climate conditions. Tree rings suggest the Altscherbitz well was in use for less than a decade before it was deliberately filled with 26 intact pots, thousands of pot fragments, and organic materials including early grains such as emmer and einkorn, strawberries, hazelnuts, and black henbane, a powerful hallucinogen. According to Elburg, the discovery of the pots was particularly surprising. “We don’t normally find intact pots from the Neolithic,” says Elburg. “If you find 26 complete ones, you know it was a ritual deposition. Perhaps it was a well for ritual water or special drinking.”

Reconstructing Tools Used to Make 7,000-Year-Old Wooden Well in Germany

Andrew Curry wrote in Archaeology magazine:“When Elburg examined the wood, he could see not only tree rings but also tool marks. But with nothing to compare these ancient tool marks to, this evidence was hard to understand. Thus, he and a motley collection of archaeologists, amateur woodworkers, historical reenactors, and flintknapping hobbyists have been gathering each spring since 2011 for a most unusual workshop. Held in a forest just outside the town of Ergersheim in the southern German region of Franconia, it’s experimental archaeology with a serious purpose. [Source: Andrew Curry, Archaeology magazine, November-December 2014]

The Neolithic period when the well was built was a time of technological and social change, marking a momentous shift from a mobile, hunter-gatherer lifestyle to settled farming communities. In Europe, this era began about 7,500 years ago, right around the time the Altscherbitz well was dug. Bringing the Neolithic culture to Europe, Elburg explains, was possible in large part because of advanced technology. “Ground-stone tools enabled these first farmers to clear the woods and build the first permanent houses in Central Europe,” he says.

Elburg’s brought along a Stone Age woodworking toolkit fashioned by freelance archaeo-technician Wulf Hein, who uses the replica tools he makes to create copies of ancient artifacts. After less than an hour of hacking away at a sturdy, decades-old oak donated by the local authorities, a glancing blow has shattered the sharp end of a basalt wedge, rendering it unusable. Elburg declares the wedge — a 5.5-pound triangle of stone with a hole in the broad end, attached to a slender wood handle — unsalvageable. It’s one of only a handful they have along. “That’s really a shame,” the archaeologist says with a grimace. “That one was really nicely carved. Too bad. Time for another broad wedge, I guess.”

“Soon, the rhythmic pounding of stone against oak picks up again. The workshop’s goal is to reconstruct a few layers of the ancient well from scratch, beginning with chopping down an oak and ending with finishing the joints. Comparing ancient evidence with the byproducts of the participants’ tree clearing and woodworking, such as the chips that litter the ground after a few hours of chopping and chiseling, will help refine what researchers know about Stone Age carpentry. Every once in a while, the noise stops to allow a researcher with a portable 3-D scanner, which looks a bit like a hand mixer with no beaters, to take progress-report scans of the gouges in the trunks. “It’s the first time we’re using the 3-D scanner in the field,” Elburg says. “We can take the records of tool marks from here and compare them to what we have from the well at Altscherbitz.”

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In addition to stone wedges and axes, the archaeologists also made cattle-bone chisels in order to learn how Neolithic carpenters were able to do finer finish work.Schweizer-Strobel has spent years examining wood, recovered at the bottom of Lake Constance, from the remains of a Neolithic settlement called Hornstaad-Hoernle, which was located on the Rhine River at the northern foot of the Alps some 6,000 years ago. Hornstaad-Hoernle is one of more than 1,000 known “pile-dwelling” settlements, which were built on prehistoric lakeshores using timber pilings to lift houses above the water. Thanks to oxygen — free conditions at the bottom of some lakes, the pilings and wood debris that dropped into the water from the settlements provide well-preserved evidence of prehistoric woodworking. “I have an unbelievable quantity of chips and waste,” says Schweizer-Strobel. “Take them out of the water and you can see every tool mark. If the ax was starting to get chipped or dull, you can see even that in the wood.”

For the complete article from which the material here is derived see The Neolithic Toolkit, Archaeology magazine Archaeology magazine

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons, Otzi Museum, oldest door from the BBC, Altscherbitz well from Rengert Elburg, Archaeological Heritage Office Saxony and Archaeology magazine, wells from Plos One

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Ancient Foods ancientfoods.wordpress.com ; Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated May 2024

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