The world's first purpose-built granary was unearthed by lan Kuijt, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, at Dhra' on a parched plateau next to the Dead Sea in the Jordan Valley. The structure, roughly 9 feet (2.9 m) square, was found about 2 feet (0.6 m) underground.
The granary is smaller than other nearby structures that appear to have been houses, an indication of its different use. Interestingly, the structure has two levels, an architectural feature never seen before in buildings of this age. Its significance as the world's first granary is that it belongs to one of the world's first settled farming communities, built just as people began to live in one place all year round rather than wandering from place to place in search of their food. In other words, it marks the time when early people were making the historic transition from hunter-gatherers to settled farmers.
The granary enabled people to store wheat and barley grains, nuts, and other produce harvested in the summer to see them through the winter months, or indeed through an unproductive summer. With food in storage, and thus constant supply, the population could rise, in turn spurring technological advances in agriculture and other occupations.
There were, of course, downsides to this development, as the first farmers concentrated on a reduced variety of crops, unbalancing their diets in comparison to the wide range of food foraged by their ancestors. The first farmers of Dhra' probably did little more than weed and water the crops that were already there, but they were helped by the fact that, at that time, the plateau they farmed was far wetter than it is now, giving them a wider variety of crops to tend than can grow in the region today.
