Revivals of public interest in the Neolithic Near East have generally coincided with the emergence of powerful imagery, such as the discovery of Çatalhöyük’s striking wall paintings in the 1960s. Now, sixty years later, the sculptures of Göbekli Tepe are ensuring the period’s widespread appeal. The capacity of these well-preserved buildings to carry such imagery until today has made them, in turn, an image of the supposed achievements of Neolithic sedentism. But the popularity of these images depends on their decontextualization. This modernist notion that permanent architecture represents the conquest of spatial forms over time is in contradiction with the early Neolithic experience of settled life, which had more to do with the unstable duration of places than with an emancipation from motion. This essay explores the Neolithic preference for earth architecture over more stable construction materials such as stone, its influence on visual culture, and how it contributed to building new living relations to the inhabited landscape. Instead of the sense of fixity and completeness that we, moderns, desperately seek in plans, reconstructions, and monumentality, it is the very transience, repetitiveness, and cumulativeness of earth that determined the transformations of the archaeological record. In other words, rhythms are key to understanding Neolithic sedentism in ways that differ wildly from the static images we have substituted for it.

公众对近东新石器时代兴趣的复兴通常与强有力的意象的出现同时发生，例如 20 世纪 60 年代发现的加塔霍裕克 (Çatalhöyük) 引人注目的壁画。六十年后的今天，哥贝克力石阵的雕塑确保了那个时期的广泛吸引力。这些保存完好的建筑至今仍承载着这样的意象，这反过来又使它们成为新石器时代定居主义所谓成就的形象。但这些图像的流行取决于它们的脱离语境。现代主义观念认为，永久性建筑代表着随着时间的推移对空间形式的征服，这与新石器时代早期定居生活的经验相矛盾，后者更多地与地方的不稳定持续时间有关，而不是与运动的解放有关。本文探讨了新石器时代对土建筑的偏好，而不是石头等更稳定的建筑材料，它对视觉文化的影响，以及它如何有助于与居住景观建立新的生活关系。我们现代人在规划、重建和纪念性中拼命寻求固定性和完整性，而不是地球的短暂性、重复性和累积性决定了考古记录的转变。换句话说，节奏是理解新石器时代久坐主义的关键，其方式与我们所取代的静态图像截然不同。