However, following the lead of missionary builders and Mwata Kazembe, from the early 1900s, most housing in the valley was of solid brick construction, sun-dried brick mainly, but with some burnt brick.
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Kallai- Kleinmann (1958), p. 155 It is mentioned by Arab geographers in the 13th and 16th centuries. Under the Ottoman Empire, it was part of the district of Gaza. In modern times, the houses were built of sun-dried brick.
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One important technological advance was the saqiya, an oxen-powered water wheel, that was introduced in the Roman period and helped increase yields and population density. Settlement patterns indicate that land was divided into individual plots rather than as in a manorial system. The peasants lived in small villages composed of clustered houses of sun-dried brick. Important industries included the production of pottery, based at Faras, and weaving based at Dongola.
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Two types of house predominated in Palestine from the second millennium BCE through to the modern era: the simple house found commonly in rural areas and the courtyard house found mostly in urban centers.Moxnes, 1997, pp. 49-51 Simple houses could be made from stone or excavated in rock, but most of the houses of this form common to the peasants of Palestine were likely made from sand-dried brick. Much of the traditional domestic architecture of modern Palestine, particularly in rural areas, was constructed using sun-dried brick, rather than stone.
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In Romania and Bulgaria they mostly worked in the villages, building houses made of čerpić (non-baked, Sun dried brick made of mud and straw), in the naboj style (compacted earth). They were spreading building influence so much, that the village architecture in the regions of Zagore and Visok is almost identical. From the late 19th century to the Balkan Wars, economic emigration intensified and the conditions in the Visok were so bad that even women travelled as seasonal workers, waving cloth. The agriculture is barely possible because of the harsh conditions, so famine developed occasionally.
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The technique probably evolved out of necessity to roof buildings with masonry elements such as bricks or stone blocks in areas where timber and wood were scarce. The earliest known example of a vault is a tunnel vault found under the Sumerian ziggurat at Nippur in Babylonia, ascribed to about 4000 BC, which was built from fired bricks amalgamated with clay mortar. The earliest tunnel vaults in Egypt are found at Requagnah and Denderah, from around 3500 BC in the predynastic era. These were built with sun-dried brick in three rings over passages descending to tombs with a span of only two metres.
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According to Tawfiq Canaan, this building tradition, in use at the beginning of the 20th century, was the same as that used by peasants in the 1st century who lived in sun-dried brick houses covered with tree branches; the upper floor serving as the family's living quarters, with the first floor used to house livestock.Moxnes, 1997, p. 60 Interior of the house of a Palestinian Christian family in Jerusalem, portrayed in a print by W. H. Bartlett, c. 1850 The most characteristic type of domestic building in Palestine, according to Halvor Moxnes, was the courtyard house, consisting of several houses enclosed by a surrounding wall that shared a common courtyard to which there was one entrance.
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In the 10th century CE, Abarquh was the spot where the roads from Shiraz, Isfahan, and Yazd converged. During this period, the writer Ibn Hawqal noted that Abarquh was the capital of the nahiyah of Rudan, which had formerly been part of Kerman Province but, by the time of his writing, had become part of Fars under the district of Estakhr. The accounts of Ibn Hawqal and his contemporary al- Maqdisi describe Abarquh as a prosperous and populous town, fortified with a citadel. The mishmash of narrow streets formed a compact, spontaneous network, and the houses, like those of Yazd were built of sun-dried brick in a vaulted shape. 10th-century Abarquh had a large Friday mosque, which was a predecessor of the current one, which dates from the post-Mongol period.
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View of excavated Buddha head in Miran, December 1906. The ruins at Miran consist of a large rectangular fort, a monastery ('the Vihara' in Stein's accounts), several stupas and many sun-dried brick constructions, located relatively close to the ancient caravan track to Dunhuang, running west to east. The many artifacts found in Miran demonstrate the extensive and sophisticated trade connections these ancient towns had with places as far away as the Mediterranean Sea. Archaeological evidence from Miran shows the influence of Buddhism on artistic work as early as the first century BC. Early Buddhist sculptures and murals excavated from the site show stylistic similarities to the traditions of Central Asia and North India and other artistic aspects of the paintings found there suggest that Miran had a direct connection with Rome and its provinces.
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One reason for this interest in the later phase seems to rest in the fact that there is a meeting point between historic settlement archaeology and oral traditions in the region generally and the fact that people can identify much more easily with this phase because it is more recent and by this fact closer to our times. It is pertinent to note that there is no settlement archaeology tradition(s) in ibeku (umuahia ibeku) Nigeria up to the early 1980s. Even at places like Ife, Old-Oyo, Benin and Zaria where some relatively limited archaeological work has been carried out, efforts were mainly concentrated on walls (Soper 1981: 61-81; Darling 1984: 498-504; Leggett 1969: 27). In Southern Nigeria, where Ibeku is located, proto-historic settlements were generally composed of mud or sun-dried brick houses.
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Relics of ancient settlements are much fewer in the south, including ibeku, than in the north, because of the different building materials as well as techniques of construction which are partly determined by diverse historical experiences among other things. Hill-tops and slopes offer abundant boulders which could be dressed for construction, while in the plains, it is much easier to obtain mud for building houses. For example, the dispersed mode of settlement of the present-day Tiv as opposed to the nucleated rural settlements on the hill-tops and slopes in ancient times, coupled with their shifting agricultural system, as well as the factor of refarming and/or resettlement of former sites by some daughter groups which hived off, from the original stock, make most ancient settlements and recently abandoned sites (made up of sun-dried brick houses) difficult to discover at least in a fairly well preserved state (Sokpo and Mbakighir 1990, Personal Communication). This preservation problem among others further make the task of establishing stratigraphic sequences a little bit difficult.
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