The five seasons of excavations which had taken place up to 1956 had very greatly extended the knowledge of the Neolithic of Jericho which had been obtained by Professor Garstang’s excavations of 1935-6. The type of well-built houses with rectangular rooms and burnished plaster floors had been found to extend all over the mound in a settlement at least the equal in size of the successive Bronze Age towns, and to have been defended, at a stage midway through its existence, by a massive stone wall. A Carbon-14 dating of c. 5850 B.C. ± was suggested by material from the immediately preceding fill. Earlier than this settlement, which it is claimed is worthy of the title of a town, was another, also of urban character, separated from the later by a complete stratigraphical break, with houses of a curvilinear plan, and with associated flint and bone industries of an entirely different type.