Jerf el Ahmar in Syria is well known as an important early Neolithic site, where meticulous excavation by a Franco-Syrian team in advance of the flooding caused by a new dam has revealed a sequence of communal buildings within the context of an evolving settlement. The site has already played a major role in revising our knowledge of the early Neolithic period. From the title of the volume under review, it might be assumed that this is the excavation report, focusing on the architectural remains in order to provide a framework for all of the other associated studies. It is instead something far more interesting and engaging.

The basic principle of this book is that, from the Neolithic period onwards, architecture has the potential to provide key insights into how society functioned. Stordeur argues that the excavations at Jerf el Ahmar have uncovered a sufficient proportion of the site to understand the range of buildings present, the use of space, the overall organisation of the settlement and, ultimately, how the community was organised. There is perhaps nothing very radical about this. What is unusual, however, is the forensic approach to this principle, where Stordeur builds her case from the particular to the general. The book is laid out in three main sections. Following a general introduction, the first part describes the individual buildings, the construction techniques, the typology of building forms and a discussion of their functions. The second part considers the settlement as a whole, describing the arrangement of the buildings, the use of exterior space and access through the settlement, and the stability and transformation of the settlement over time. The final part of the book brings all this accumulated information together to consider the nature of the community that lived at Jerf el Ahmar.

The value of this approach is clear from the very first chapter. The importance of documenting the chaîne opératoire in minute detail, starting with site preparation and the collection of building materials, is central to understanding the choices available to the builders, their historical context and which changes represent real innovations. The chapter on techniques is a DIY manual on how to build a Neolithic house, especially in the way photographs and drawings are used to illustrate every point (the use of illustrations throughout the volume is exemplary). But the minutiae of construction techniques also provide insights on many other processes—for example, on the use of light chaff as temper in mud construction, which helps understanding of how cereals (still wild at this date) were harvested and processed, how storing chaff for later construction must have been an important activity incorporated within food preparation, and how scheduling different tasks over an extended period would have been a critical part of construction.

The architectural analysis is led by this in-depth knowledge of technique, which enables the examination of the processes of change. New building types are added to the architectural repertoire over time, but they relied on well-understood materials and techniques, even when there appears to be a real burst of creativity in design. It is clear that construction was carried out in the context of designed and planned projects, initially centred around the building of individual houses, but increasingly as part of collective works. Large-scale projects are manifest in the switch from simply building on the natural hill slope to the construction of terraces across the site—substantial preparatory work that would not only have required the labour of the entire community, but also agreement on the overall design of the built environment.

The communal buildings are the other clear indication of collective effort. The earliest examples are less obvious, but there are subsequently large subterranean communal buildings with interior divisions and partitions, very similar to those at Mureybet only 60km to the south. These communal buildings are interpreted as multi-functional structures, with the internal cells assumed to have been used primarily for community storage. The deliberate destruction of these buildings by fire, and the presence of a decapitated skeleton placed on the floor in the centre of one of the buildings, suggests that they always had an ideological or ritual aspect. This aspect appears to have increased in importance with the final form of these buildings, when the cells disappeared and benches were constructed around the interiors of the perimeter walls, defining open central spaces. This new form is interpreted as more narrowly specialised, designed to provide meeting places for the community's elite. Our conventional interpretation of the earliest Neolithic societies as relatively egalitarian has often emphasised shared storage as an indicator of the intentional maintenance of equality (storage was then internalised within large, multi-roomed houses). Stordeur's proposal that the later communal buildings at Jerf el Ahmar were used by an elite group raises the possibility that the earlier storage buildings represent a system of controlled access.

The theme of access is a key principle of the wider analysis presented in the volume. The community at Jerf el Ahmar was not a single, collective social group. Rather, Stordeur argues that the community was divided in two, as indicated by the existence of distinct neighbourhoods, with different types of houses, evolving through different sequences and at different paces. The inhabitants of one neighbourhood had better access to the large communal buildings, although even within individual neighbourhoods, access varied from house to house. The argument is that this built landscape reflects a gradation of power and access, both between neighbourhoods and individual households within those neighbourhoods.

This is a site report with a difference. It is deeply grounded in precise excavation and recording, and based on the cumulative knowledge from an extensive series of excavations of Neolithic sites in northern Syria conducted over many years. The way the book is laid out leads to some repetition, as each stage of the argument is recapped and then used as evidence in the next stage, but despite this—and in contrast to most dry stratigraphic reports—it is a good read. The forensic approach not only makes for good archaeology, but also for an interesting engagement with the evidence.