ABSTRACT
From the beginning of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, the archaeology changes. In the Levant, where the late Epipalaeolithic Natufian precedes the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic, the cultural transition is rapid and striking. All around the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent, there appear substantial, permanent, and often long-lived settlements. In most parts, the houses are simple, small, circular buildings that are often semi-subterranean. A number of settlements have been found to have possessed large circular communal buildings, the most monumental and impressive of which are those at Göbekli Tepe in southeast Anatolia. In many settlements, human burials have been found, and some of the bodies lacked their skulls which had been removed by revisiting the burial. While settlements within a region, for example in the Levant, share general cultural characteristics, each community had its own individual way of implementing those characteristics.
