ancient Greece and Rome, humans were designing and constructing. The period known as the Classical Era grew from ideas and construction techniques that evolved centuries and eons apart in distant locations. This review illustrates how each new movement builds on the one before. Although our timeline lists dates related mostly to American architecture, historic periods do not start and stop at precise points on a map or a calendar. Periods and styles flow together, sometimes merging contradictory ideas, sometimes inventing new approaches, and often re-awakening and re-inventing older movements. Dates are always approximate—architecture is a fluid art.
11,600 BCE to 3,500 BCE — Prehistoric Times
Archaeologists "dig" prehistory. Göbekli Tepe in present day Turkey is a good
example of archaeological architecture. Before recorded history, humans constructed earthen mounds, stone circles, megaliths, and structures that often puzzle modern-day archaeologists. Prehistoric architecture includes monumental structures such as Stonehenge, cliff dwellings in the Americas, and thatch and mud structures lost to time. The dawn of architecture is found in these structures. Prehistoric builders moved earth and stone into geometric forms, creating our earliest human-made formations. We don't know why primitive people began building geometric structures. Archaeologists can only guess that prehistoric people looked to the heavens to imitate the sun and the moon, using that circular shape in their creations of earth mounds and monolithic henges. Many fine examples of well-preserved prehistoric architecture are found in southern England. Stonehenge in Amesbury, United Kingdom is a well-known example of the prehistoric stone circle. The nearby Silbury Hill, also in Wiltshire, is the largest man-made, prehistoric earthen mound in Europe. At 30 meters high and 160 meters wide, the gravel mound is layers of soil, mud, and grass, with dug pits and tunnels of chalk and clay.1 Completed in the late Neolithic period, approximately 2,400 BCE, its architects were a Neolithic civilization in Britain. The prehistoric sites in southern Britain (Stonehenge, Avebury, and associated sites) are collectively a UNESCO World Heritage Site. "The design, position, and inter-relationship of the monuments and sites," according to UNESCO, "are evidence of a wealthy and highly organized prehistoric society able to impose its concepts on the environment." To some, the ability to change the environment is key for a structure to be called architecture. Prehistoric structures are sometimes considered the birth of architecture. If nothing else, primitive structures certainly raise the question, what is architecture? Why does the circle dominate man's earliest architecture? It is the shape of the sun and the moon, the first shape humans realized to be significant to their lives. The duo of architecture and geometry goes way back in time and may be the source of what humans find "beautiful" even today.