ABSTRACT
For much of the last century, architecture, as with tool use and manufacture, was generally regarded by archaeologists, cultural historians and architects themselves as an exclusively human preoccupation, mostly restricted to advanced, urban cultures. Bernard Rudofsky’s inclusion of animal constructions together with those of humans in the later publication is all the more noteworthy for its timing. Animal tool use had only been discovered in the previous decade and the constructions of other species were then still a long way off from being accorded the attention they are now by researchers of animal behaviour or niche construction theorists. Rudofsky’s insights have since been amply supported by more recent and detailed research into all forms of animal architecture, of which Mike Hansell’s study, Built by Animals, offers an extensive account. In his radical reworking of evolutionary theory, The Artificial Ape, Timothy Taylor, also an archaeologist and prehistorian, goes further still in making the case for technology shaping human evolution.
