The Social, Political and Economic Functions of Courtyard Houses in Umm Qais, Northern Jordan
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The Social, Political and Economic Functions of Courtyard Houses in Umm Qais, Northern Jordan Abdulhakim Alhusban & Abdulla Al-Shorman
Published online: 16 November 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract The courtyard house represents a model for the collective social, political and economic functions of the peasant community during the nineteenth century in northern Jordan. Ethnography, landscape and space syntax analyses were used to reconstruct these functions in the area of Umm Qais, Jordan. The results show that the various social systems in the study area were centered on kinship leaving projections in the form and order of the various spaces in the courtyard house. The nature of the landscape was a determinant factor in the location of courtyard houses, which was triggered by the climate regime in the area. Keywords Courtyards . Space syntax . GIS . Housing . Jordan
Introduction Even in the presence of small variations in climte, topography and technology, architectural, and spatial forms may vary in a given geographical locality. Alternatively, little variations in architectural forms might have been persisted over time. For example, the architectural forms in Jordan’s Neolithic era remained, more or less, the same for thousands of years afterward. Therefore, space (a complex or a house) may not be considered as a by-product of simple external causes; the social processes mirrored themselves as projections on the space and bestow the opportunity to study the social structure as argued by Levi-Strauss (1967). The relationships among the various spatial elements of the same space convey the social relationships and processes, where they can be quantifiable (Hillier et al. 1987). The space projections of the social structure and/or the social processes must not be A. Alhusban : A. Al-Shorman (*) Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology, Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan e-mail: [email protected] A. Alhusban e-mail: [email protected]
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Int J Histor Archaeol (2011) 15:1–9
interpreted divorced from the surrounding landscape, especially when dealing with cases in eras where the technologies were underdeveloped and the quest for food and safety prioritized technological innovations; such was the case for the house analyzed in this study. The earliest courtyard houses were reported from the Levant and Mesopotamia and date to the beginning of the third millennium BCE (Zien Alabedeen 2006). Other courtyard houses in the rest of the world evolved independently (Buti 1962). The courtyard house is a dwelling that includes cells surrounded by a wall; either the house encloses a courtyard or the courtyard borders the house (Petherbridge 1978). The first courtyard houses were inhabited by sedentary farmers and by semi-nomads (Bazzana 1992). In the Arab region, both the implicit and the explicit sociocultural beliefs are the determining factors in the formation of the domestic setting, defining what is socially acceptable (Salama 2003). Although courtyard houses may exist
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