Construction history

People have constructed buildings and other structures since prehistory, including bridges, amphitheatres, dams, roads and canals. Building materials in present use have a long history and some of the structures built thousands of years ago are regarded as remarkable. The history of construction overlaps that of structural engineering and many other fields. To understand why things were constructed the way they were in prehistory, we also need to rely on archaeology to record the form of the parts that survive and the tools used, and other branches of history and architecture to investigate how the builders lived and recorded their accomplishments.

The history of building is marked by a number of trends. One is the increasing durability of the materials used. Early building materials were perishable, such as leaves, branches, and animal hides. Later, more durable natural materials such as clay, stone, and timber, and, finally, synthetic materials, such as brick, concrete, metals, and plastics were used. Another is a quest for buildings of ever greater height and span; this was made possible by the development of stronger materials and by knowledge of how materials behave and how to exploit them to greater advantage. A third major trend involves the degree of control exercised over the interior environment of buildings: increasingly precise regulation of air temperature, light and sound levels, humidity, odours, air speed, and other factors that affect human comfort has been possible. Yet another trend is the change in energy available to the construction process, starting with human muscle power and developing toward the powerful machinery used today.

Also, a trend toward more fire-safe materials.

Neolithic, also known as the New Stone Age, was a time period roughly from 9000 BC to 5000 BC named because it was the last period of the age before wood working began. The tools available were made from natural materials including bone, antler, hide, stone, wood, grasses, animal fibers, and the use of water. These tools were used by people to cut such as with the hand axe, chopper, adze, and celt. Also to scrape, chop such as with a flake tool, pound, pierce, roll, pull, leaver, and carry. Building materials included bones such as mammoth ribs, hide, stone, metal, bark, bamboo, clay, lime plaster, and more.For example, the first bridges made by humans were probably just wooden logs placed across a stream and later timber trackways. In addition to living in caves and rock shelters, the first buildings were simple shelters, tents like the Inuit's tupiq, and huts sometimes built as pit-houses meant to suit the basic needs of protection from the elements and sometimes as fortifications for safety such as the crannog. Built self-sufficiently by their inhabitants rather than by specialist builders, using locally available materials and traditional designs and methods which together are called vernacular architecture. The very simplest shelters, tents, leave no traces. Because of this, what little we can say about very early construction is mostly conjecture and based on what we know about the way nomadic hunter-gatherers and herdsmen in remote areas build shelters today. The absence of metal tools placed limitations on the materials that could be worked, but it was still possible to build quite elaborate stone structures with ingenuity using dry stone walling techniques such as at Skara Brae in Scotland, Europe's most complete Neolithic village. The first mud bricks, formed with the hands rather than wooden moulds, belong to the late Neolithic period and were found in Jericho. One of the largest structures of this period was the Neolithic long house. In all cases of timber framed and log structures in these very early cultures, only the very lowest parts of the walls and post holes are unearthed in archaeological excavations, making reconstruction of the upper parts of these buildings largely conjectural.

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