How did the shift from hunting to farming reshape where people lived and the art and architecture they made?
The Neolithic revolution and settlement: how the adoption of agriculture produced the first permanent settlements, and how the art and architecture of Jericho, Catalhoyuk, and the Beaker with ibex reflect settled, farming life.
A focused answer on the Neolithic works of AP Art History Content Area 1, covering the settlements of Jericho and Catalhoyuk, the plastered skulls and wall paintings found there, and the Beaker with ibex: how farming created permanent towns and how their art and architecture express new concerns with the dead, the household, and decoration.
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What this topic is asking
This topic covers the Neolithic works of Content Area 1: the settlements of Jericho and Catalhoyuk (with their plastered skulls and wall paintings) and the Beaker with ibex from Susa. The skill is to connect the Neolithic revolution, the shift from hunting and gathering to farming, to the new kinds of art and architecture that settled life produced.
The Neolithic revolution
The most important development of the later content area is the change in how people lived.
This single shift explains the difference between the cave paintings and portable objects of mobile Palaeolithic peoples and the towns, wall paintings, and household rituals of the Neolithic.
Jericho
Jericho, in the Jordan valley, is one of the oldest continuously settled places on earth. Its great stone wall and tower (around 8000 BCE) are among the earliest monumental constructions, showing a community able to organize large-scale building, whether for defense, flood control, or ritual is debated.
Catalhoyuk
Catalhoyuk, in present-day Turkey (about 7400 to 5200 BCE), is the fullest picture of an early farming town.
The houses were mud-brick, packed tightly together with no streets: people moved across the rooftops and entered their homes through openings in the roof. Inside were hearths, storage bins, and burials beneath the floors, so the living and the dead shared the same space. The walls carried paintings of bulls, hunting scenes, and what may be the earliest landscape or map, and rooms held bull horns and modelled reliefs. Like Jericho, Catalhoyuk preserved plastered skulls.
Catalhoyuk is a teaching example of how the household became a center of art and ritual: decoration, the dead, and the symbolic animal all sit inside the home.
The Beaker with ibex
The Beaker with ibex motifs, from Susa in present-day Iran (about 4200 to 3500 BCE), shows a different facet of Neolithic life: refined craft.
It is a tall, thin-walled painted terracotta beaker decorated with highly stylised animals: a large ibex (wild goat) reduced to bold geometric shapes, with its horns sweeping into a near-circle, above bands of running dogs and long-necked birds. The abstraction and the careful banding show a settled society with the time and skill to make beautiful, possibly funerary, pottery. The ibex reminds us that animals remained important even as life changed, a continuity across the Palaeolithic and Neolithic.
Try this
Q1. What is the Neolithic revolution, and why does it matter for art history? [Recall]
- Cue. The shift from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture; it produced permanent towns and new art tied to the household, the dead, and stored surplus.
Q2. Give one feature of Catalhoyuk and explain what it shows about settled life. [Short explanation]
- Cue. Dense roof-entered mud-brick houses with burials beneath the floors and painted walls show a permanent community in which decoration, the dead, and ritual were centered in the home.
Exam-style practice questions
Practice questions written in the style of College Board exam questions on this dot point, with worked answer explainers. The year tag is the paper they imitate, not the source.
AP 2019 (style)5 marksAn image of a Neolithic settlement or a work found in one is shown (image provided). Using specific visual or architectural evidence, explain ONE way the work reflects settled, agricultural life. Explain ONE way the adoption of farming changed the kinds of art people made.Show worked answer →
A Visual and Contextual Analysis short-essay task, 5 points.
Settled life: dense, adjoining mud-brick houses entered through the roof (as at Catalhoyuk) show a permanent, planned community rather than a mobile camp; storage, hearths, and burials under floors show people staying in one place.
Change with farming: settled life produced new art tied to the household and the dead, for example wall paintings and plastered skulls kept within homes, rather than the portable objects and cave images of mobile hunters.
Markers reward tying a concrete feature to the shift from hunting to farming.
AP 2020 (style)5 marksCompare a Palaeolithic work with a Neolithic work from the required image set. Make a defensible claim about how the change from hunting to farming is reflected in the two works, supported by specific evidence.Show worked answer →
A Continuity and Change short-essay task, 5 points.
Claim: the move from hunting to farming shifted art from portable, animal-focused images made by mobile people toward fixed architecture and household ritual tied to a permanent place.
Evidence: a Palaeolithic cave painting of animals (mobile, hunting society) versus the mud-brick houses, wall paintings, and plastered skulls of Catalhoyuk (settled, farming society).
Reasoning: explain HOW permanence created new needs, building, storage, honoring the dead in the home, then add complexity, noting continuities such as the ongoing importance of animals (bulls at Catalhoyuk, ibex on the Susa beaker).
Related dot points
- Contextualizing Content Area 1: the chronological and geographic scope of global prehistory, the problem of interpreting art without written records, and the College Board enduring understandings that frame the eleven required works.
Sets the scene for AP Art History Content Area 1, explaining the 30,000 to 500 BCE timeframe, the global spread of the eleven required works, why interpreting prehistoric art is uncertain, and how the College Board enduring understandings about form, function, content, and context shape your analysis.
- Cave and rock painting in global prehistory: the form, technique, and probable function of Palaeolithic cave painting and later rock art, and how art historians interpret images made without writing.
A focused answer on the painted works of AP Art History Content Area 1, covering the Great Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux, the Apollo 11 stones, and the Running Horned Woman: their pigments and technique, their composition and subjects, and the leading interpretations of why prehistoric people painted animals and figures.
- Figurative and portable objects in prehistory: the form, material, and probable meaning of small carved and modelled works, from the Ambum Stone and the camelid sacrum to the Tlatilco figurines and the jade cong.
A focused answer on the small-scale works of AP Art History Content Area 1, covering the Ambum Stone, the camelid sacrum, the Tlatilco figurines, and the jade cong: their materials and craft, how they represent the body and the animal, and the leading interpretations of their ritual, social, and funerary meaning.
- Megalithic and monumental architecture: the form, construction, and probable function of Stonehenge as the key example of prehistoric monument building, and what such sites reveal about labor, the sky, and the dead.
A focused answer on the monumental architecture of AP Art History Content Area 1, centered on Stonehenge: its post-and-lintel construction, its astronomical alignment, the organized labor it required, and the leading interpretations of why a prehistoric society built it, with honest attention to interpretive uncertainty.
- The visual analysis skill in Content Area 1: how to read line, shape, color, material, and composition in a work of art, move from form to inferred function, and frame the result as a defensible claim for the AP free-response tasks.
A skills-focused page for AP Art History, using the works of global prehistory to teach the core discipline of visual analysis: the vocabulary of form (line, shape, color, texture, scale, composition), how to move from what you see to what you can infer, and how to turn that into the defensible claim the free-response rubrics reward.
Sources & how we know this
- AP Art History Course and Exam Description — College Board (2020)
- AP Art History Required Works: Global Prehistory — Smarthistory (2023)