CATALHOYUK - UPDATES

"Since Çatalhöyük, there's been a change in my mind. If agriculture didn't cause the settled life, then what did? One possibility is that sites like this were built around ritual," he says with a dimpled grin from under his straw hat. And it is in response to questions like these that postmodern methods may prove useful.

Postmodernism is all about how people go about doing archeology and then interpreting what comes out of the ground, Hodder says. It assumes that different people will see different connections among artifacts, and this affects everything from the digging process itself to the "stories" that are told in archeological reports, the popular press, books and museum displays like the one in Ankara.

In Mellaart's era at Çatalhöyük, and still today at many archeological sites, the practice seems simple, if painstaking: Excavate as much as possible in the time period allowed by the project's funding, record the artifacts and their contexts, send them to laboratories and specialists, get the "facts" about them and then write up "the story of the site." This straightforward method developed into a school of thought known as processualism, which meant the study of the process by which humans adapted to their environment. It assumed an objective nature inherent in the scientific process. As Mellaart says, "At Çatalhöyük, you had all the resources you needed to stay sedentary—a river famous for its trout, an abundance of natural plants and animals, obsidian and timber all within reach. This was why they settled here." But processualism leaves little room to explain the emergence of non-material things, like art or the early expressions of religious sentiment.