CATALHOYUK - UPDATES

Reconstruction of Çatalhöyük by John G. Swogger of the Çatalhöyük Research Project

I stand with Hodder at the edge of a gaping hole six meters (20') deep that's propped with a stout steel structure to keep the sides from falling in. "This is our deep sounding," he explains. "The bottom here is 9500 years old," he says. When Mellaart attempted his deep sounding (a technique for going as deep as possible to quickly determine the earliest level of a site), it flooded with groundwater only three meters down.

"Let's go over to the west mound," says Hodder. We cross a thin, dusty, dry creek bed. "This side is not as old," he says. "But that doesn't mean it's any less interesting. We're looking for some continuity with the east mound." The west mound is dated to the Chalcolithic Period (so called because the earliest use of copper occurred then), roughly a thousand years later than the east mound. It's the second season on this mound spent excavating a single house. It appears to be smaller than those on the east mound, but it contains more rooms, and it seems to have had the same roof entry. "We haven't found any paintings yet, but we have elaborate pottery with the same bulls and leopard designs as the house walls of the east mound," Hodder says. "We haven't encountered any burials under the floors here either. Perhaps there was a community cemetery. The house may have become less important symbolically. They may have been evolving from a house-based society to a village-based one, with exchange and task specialization." Every archeologist speculates, he says, and this is exactly the kind of preliminary interpretation that, instead of being codified in official papers and museum display boards, is instead raw material for the challenges of multidisciplinary analysis, reflexivity and multivocality.