Chips off the Block

Abstract

Material structures organised in pairs were significant features within shrines and special buildings of the Near Eastern Epipaleolithic and early Neolithic. These stone and plaster monuments came to bear defining humanoid features that possibly commemorated mythical brothers or twins. The twin god theme appears widely in ethnographies, and is used to define celestial luminaries, divisions of space and the opposing extremes of the seasonal year. Material and environmental evidence of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic phase of the Near East further indicates that these features, replete with early constellation images, monumentalise a calendar-informed cosmology and reveal a significant correlation between cultic monuments, social gatherings and times of the year.