Tower of Jericho
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The tower of Jericho, built about 8000 BCE beside the spring that still feeds the town, is one of the oldest monumental stone structures known. It stands some 8.5 metres high, is built of roughly hewn stone set without mortar, and encloses an interior staircase of 22 steps that climbs to a platform; nearby stood a stone wall about 3.6 metres high that protected the settlement and its water. Dorothy Garrod found the tower in the 1930s, and Kathleen Kenyon later dated it to the pre-pottery Neolithic A. Excavations showed that the structure was deliberately filled several times, and the skeletons of two people buried in the fill were found nearby, which has prompted theories from ancestor cult to flood marker. The tower's purpose remains disputed: it is not a good defensive work, and it faces away from the entrance, so ideas have ranged from a ritual platform to a marker of social authority. Whatever it was, it demonstrates that settled communities in the Jordan valley could organise labour and feed workers long before writing, metal or the plough. The tower and wall were rebuilt several times, and the settlement itself was one of the longest-occupied places in the Levant, lived in for thousands of years.