CATALHOYUK - UPDATES

[Bianca]

View of the mound from the air in 1997

The ultimate aim is to provide the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism with a well planned heritage site. (For the Site Management Plan click here.) Visitors are able to experience the site in a number of ways. A conservation laboratory has been built and the latest techniques applied. The aim is that the conserved wall paintings, sculptures, textiles, wooden and ceramic artifacts will be placed on display in a site museum, enhanced by virtual reality techniques and interactive video.

Replicas of some of the paintings are being placed back in conserved houses on the site, under a range of shelters. Part of the site is being covered so that the ancient houses are protected and so that visitors can walk around a Neolithic village. An experimental house has been built for tourist entry. By providing a range of visitor experiences the full heritage potential of the site can begin to be exploited.

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Ian Hodder Professor Ph.D. Cambridge, 1974
ihodder@stanford.edu
Tel: 723-1197 / 723-5038
office: 110-111D
office hours: W 12-2





Ian Hodder joined the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology in September of 1999. Among his publications are: Symbols in Action (Cambridge 1982), Reading the Past (Cambridge 1986), The Domestication of Europe (Oxford 1990), and The Archaeological Process (Oxford 1999). He is continuing his research into archaeological theory and has recently published a volume of his collected papers 'Archaeology beyond Dialogue' (Utah 2004).
 
Professor Hodder has been conducting the excavation of the 9,000 year-old Neolithic site of Catalhöyük in central Turkey. The 25- year project has three aims - to place the art from the site in its full environmental, economic and social context, to conserve the paintings, plasters and mud walls, and to present the site to the public. The project is also associated with attempts to develop reflexive methods in archaeology. Dr. Hodder is currently the Dunlevie Family Professor of Archaeology at Stanford University.

[Bianca]

EARLIEST KNOWN MAPS



The first known maps are of the heavens, not the earth. Dots dating to 16,500 BC found on the walls of the Lascaux caves map out part of the night sky, including the three bright stars Vega, Deneb and Altair (the Summer Triangle asterism); as well as the Pleiades star cluster. The Cueva di El Castillo cave in Spain contains a dot map of the Corona Borealis constellation dating from 12,000 BC.

Cave painting and rock carvings with elements that may represent landscape features such as hills or dwellings can be seen here.



The oldest extant picture that resembles a map was created in the late 7th millennium BC in Çatalhöyük, Anatolia, modern Turkey. This wall painting represents a plan of an early-civilized city that prospered by trading obsidian.

Whoever created the Çatalhöyük ‘mental map’ may have been encouraged by the fact that houses in Çatalhöyük were clustered together and were entered via flat roofs. Therefore, it was normal for the inhabitants to view their city from a bird’s eye view. Later civilizations followed the same convention.

Today, almost all maps are drawn as if we are looking down from the sky instead of from a horizontal or oblique perspective. There are exceptions: one of the ‘quasi-maps’ of the Minoan civilization on Crete, the “House of the Admiral” wall painting dating from c. 1600 BC, shows a seaside community in an oblique perspective.

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[erin]

Very beautiful work, Bianca.  I long been meaning to pay tribute to Catal Hoyuk here, it is one of the most important archaeological sites in all the world!   The pictures certainly do it justice.

[Bianca]

Thank you, Erin.  This story writes itself and the 'net has plenty of pictures to use.

Catalhoyuk and Jiroft are both places to keep our eye on if we are interested in this subject.

Here's Jiroft's account:

http://atlantisonline.smfforfree2.com/index.php/topic,2676.0.html

I'm sure you'll enjoy it!

[Bianca]

                                           Pre-Historic �atal H�y�k in Anatolia




 The Neolithic site of �atalh�y�k was first discovered in the late 1950s and excavated by James Mellaart between 1961 and 1965. The site rapidly became famous internationally due to the large size and dense occupation of the settlement as well as the spectacular wall paintings and other art that was uncovered inside the houses ...

Nine thousand years ago visitors approaching �atalh�y�k from across a vast marshy plain would have seen hundreds of mud-brick dwellings on the slopes of an enormous settlement mound. The site's several thousand inhabitants would have been herding sheep or goats; hunting wild cattle (aurochs), horse, and deer; tending crops of peas, lentils, and cereals; or collecting wild plant foods such as tubers from the marshes. Some would have been bringing valuable raw materials to the site such as obsidian from volcanic peaks to the northeast. In size and complexity �atalh�y�k was unlike any other site in the world. The American archaeologist Walter Fairservis Junior writing in 1975 described it as a community at the threshold of civilization ...

 Ancient cities as we find them today are not impressive sights. All that remains of Catal Huyuk, the first city, is a gullied pitted mound floating in a rolling plain of wheatfields. Little is left to show that this place was a primary source of Western civilization, a nexus of trade and ideas for two thousand years, the first organized cosmopolitan city-state and arguably the source of the Great Mother Goddess religion -- the universal faith of Europe, the Near East and the Far East before the great empires of the Fertile Crescent arose. Sadly most of the research on this unique neolithic site has been abandoned and thousands of pages of analysis remain unpublished. Only one acre of the thirty-two acre mound has been systematically excavated, recorded, and reported. This was Catal Huyuk, the ancestress of all other cities, a unique Temple City that was the religious center of the first great prehistoric civilization ...


http://ancientneareast.tripod.com/Catal_Hoyuk.html

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This painting of costumed crane dancers, by artist John-Gordon Swogger from the prize-winning Antiquity article, shows how an 8,500-year-old bird wing might have been used at Çatalhöyük.






           Bird-wing discovery at Neolithic site prompts question: What makes humans do the crane dance?





FOR RELEASE: Sept. 13, 2004
Contact: Roger Segelken
Office: 607-255-9736
E-Mail: hrs2@cornell.edu

 
 
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Eighty-five hundred years after someone in ancient Anatolia drilled holes in the wings of a crane -- evidently to make a bird costume for a ritual dance -- then hid one wing in a narrow space between mudbrick houses at Çatalhöyük in what today is Turkey, scientists are asking a two-part question: Why stash the wing, along with a pile of other unusual items, in a place where only modern-day archaeologists would be likely to find it? And why do people around the world dance like cranes?

For posing that question -- and attempting to answer it with evidence from an archaeological "dig" through a long-buried Anatolian village and from a museum collection of modern bird bones in Ithaca, N.Y. -- two Cornell University scientists have won the Antiquity Essay Prize for the best article of the year in that scholarly journal. Written by Nerissa Russell, associate professor of anthropology in Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences, and by Kevin McGowan, a research associate in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the puzzle-filled article is titled "Dance of the Cranes: Crane Symbolism at Çatalhöyük and Beyond" and was first published in September 2003.

Says ornithologist McGowan: "Dancing is one of the most obvious displays by any social bird, and all species of cranes do it. It is quite striking and impossible to miss -- by people today as well as those in cultures thousands of years ago" the dance involves stiff-legged marching, running and leaping into the air with spread and beating wings, bowing, pirouetting, stopping and starting and tossing twigs into the air.

Zooarchaeologist Russell (an anthropologist who studies the role of animals in the lives of ancient peoples) adds: "Cranes of various species are found all over the world, with the exception of South America and Antarctica, and so are human crane dancers. They were at ancient Chinese funerals and Okinawan harvest festivals. The Ainu of Japan, the BaTwa of southern Africa and the Ostiaks of Siberia did costumed crane dances. Plutarch writes that Theseus and his companions, after they slew the Minotaur and landed in Delos, performed a crane dance."

One thing zooarchaeologists look for is possible human-made marks on animal bones, Russell explains. She can tell whether an Ice Age mastodon was butchered by meat-eating Paleoindians in North America, for example, or whether the now-extinct animal died from other causes. The Çatalhöyük crane wing bones do not bear discernible butcher markings (although cranes are edible, according to McGowan, who has tasted sandhill crane meat and rates it "quite palatable"). Rather, the bones of a common crane (Grus grus , as determined by comparison with bones in the collections of the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates and the Smithsonian) were pierced with a series of holes.

The holes were placed in a way that makes no sense for dismembering the wing or removing its meat. Rather, the piercings created suitably sized holes for a piece of cord or string. That's why Russell thinks the 8,500-year-old wings -- when they still had feathers on them -- might have been laced on the arms of a dancer to make a costume. Their Antiquity article includes an artist's guess of what such a dance costume might have looked like.

Along with the crane wing in the narrow space between buildings -- and inaccessible until other archaeologists excavated that spot beginning in 1995 -- were the following: a cow's horn, two wild goat horns, the skull of a dog and the stone head of a macelike weapon. The "special" items appear to have been deposited in the space at the same time, probably while the building was being constructed, Russell says, noting some artistic works of that period combine depictions of cranelike birds, cattle and dogs or foxes in the same motif.

"This raises the possibility of an enduring mythic association of cattle, canids and cranes in Neolithic Anatolia," McGowan and Russell wrote in their prize-winning article. While they were pondering crane dance mystery and wondering why people around the world are sufficiently intrigued with the birds to imitate them in dances. Russell and McGowan made a list of human-crane similarities:

o G. grus and H. sapiens are both bipedal and both stand about the same height.

o Cranes and ancient humans lived to about the same age, around 40 years.

o Humans and cranes have similar social structures. Both species congregate in large flocks; form lasting, monogamous pairs; and keep the young in the family for an extended period of juvenile dependency. Humans and cranes tend to move in family groups.

o We humans and those cranes make similar "music." The crane's call, from its long, coiled trachea, sounds like a person playing a bugle.

When one crane starts to dance, others usually join in, McGowan says, adding one more fact about the sociable birds: Sometimes a group of cranes is just standing around and can be encouraged to dance by a human imitating the crane dance. Other times, just the sight of an approaching human will start them dancing.

Whatever the answer to the dance mystery, McGowan, who is an expert on crows, won't have to eat crane for a while. The Antiquity award carries a cash prize of 1,000 British pounds.

[Bianca]

                                                          This Old House





At Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic site in Turkey, families packed their
mud-brick houses close together and traipsed over roofs
to climb into their rooms from above.

By Ian Hodder

Except for the maps, all photos and illustrations © the Çatalhöyük Research Project (www.catalhoyuk.com)
 
 very summer since 1993 I have returned to central Turkey to work on the archaeological excavation of a mound nearly seventy feet high. As I tread over its soil, I feel a tingling in my feet, knowing that buried beneath me are the abundant remains of a town inhabited from 9,400 until 8,000 years ago. Rising just 500 feet to my west is a second, smaller mound, which was occupied from about 8,000 until 7,700 years ago. The archaeological site made up of the two mounds is still no more than 5 percent exposed. Until the digs began, an old footpath made a fork at the mounds, and so the larger one became known locally as Çatalhöyük (pronounced approximately cha-tal-HU-yuk), which means “fork mound.” The archaeological site has adopted that name.

Çatalhöyük was first identified and excavated in the late 1950s and early 1960s by the English archaeologist James Mellaart. His excavations revealed fourteen levels of occupation in the larger mound, created as people tore down old houses, filled them in, and built new ones on top. Altogether, Mellaart excavated about 160 buildings, spread over the various levels. Each building probably housed a family of between five and ten people. One main room was the locus of family living, cooking, eating, craft activities, and sleeping, and there were side rooms for storage and food preparation.




 Wall painting, some 8,500 years old, was discovered by the English archaeologist James Mellaart in the 1960s, during his excavations of the Turkish site of Çatalhöyük. In Mellaart’s interpretation of the painting, the foreground shows a town, possibly Çatalhöyük itself, with the eruption, in the background, of a twin-peaked volcano, perhaps Hasan Dağ (see map below). Mellaart’s reconstruction of the painting appears at the head of the article.

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Mellaart’ s excavations turned up evidence that the people of Çatalhöyük made use of domesticated plants and animals. The finding excited wide interest, because it meant that very early farming villages grew up not only in the Levant and adjacent areas of the Middle East, where wild plants and animals were first domesticated, but also here, in Anatolia. But even more astonishing were some other distinctive characteristics of Çatalhöyük that Mellaart was the first to describe. The houses of Çatalhöyük were so tightly packed together that there were few or no streets. Access to interior spaces was across roofs—which had been made of wood and reeds plastered with mud—and down stairs. People buried their dead beneath the floors. Above all, the interiors were rich with artwork—mural paintings, reliefs, and sculptures, including images of women that some interpreted as evidence for a cult of a mother goddess.

Çatalhöyük was quite large for a town of Neolithic age—the time from about 11,500 to 8,000 years ago, when people began living in relatively permanent villages and making use of domesticated crops and animals. The population fluctuated between 3,000 and 8,000; in physical area the large mound encompassed some 33.5 acres. Unsurprisingly then, despite excavating for four years, Mellaart uncovered only a small part of the town. The current dig, which I direct, has excavated or determined the outlines of eighty more buildings and has identified four additional levels of occupation in the larger mound. Yet as I walk over that mound, I am well aware that thousands of buildings are still hidden beneath the soil, full of art and symbolism, waiting to be explored.

Archaeologists do know a lot more now than they did at the time of Mellaart’s discovery about other Anatolian settlements dating from the Neolithic. But for any student of that era—myself included—Çatalhöyük and its mysteries hold a special appeal. What led to the concentration of art in so many houses at one site? Why was the settlement so large—what drew people to that particular place? And how much can be learned from what is perhaps the most intriguing feature of all about Çatalhöyük: that the site was built and rebuilt over the centuries in ways that provide an unusually rich record of the minutiae of daily life?

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The main reason for the abundance of the archaeological record was that the Çatalhöyükans used a particular kind of construction material. Instead of making hard, lime floors that held up for decades (as was the case at many sites in Anatolia and the Middle East), the inhabitants of Çatalhöyük made their floors mostly out of a lime-rich mud plaster, which remained soft and in need of continual resurfacing. Once a year—in some cases once a month—floors and wall plasters had to be resurfaced. Those thin layers of plaster, somewhat like the growth rings in a tree, trap traces of activity in a well-defined temporal sequence. The floors even preserve such subtle tokens of daily life as the impressions of floor mats. Middens are just as finely layered, making it possible to identify details as subtle as individual dumps of trash from a hearth.

When a house reached the end of its practical life, people demolished the upper walls and carefully filled in the lower half of the house, which then became the foundation for new walls of a new house. The mound itself came into being largely through such gradual accumulation. Taking it apart enables us to revisit the past.

Çatalhöyük lies in the Konya Basin, which in Neolithic times was mostly a semiarid plain with steppe vegetation: grasses, sedges, and small bushes [see maps below]. The soil, the residue from a vanished lake, was made up of marls—deposits of clay with high levels of calcium carbonate. Its consistency and low nutrient value made the soil unsuitable for early forms of agriculture. The basin, however, included some marshy areas, several rivers, and, perhaps, some small, shallow, seasonal lakes. In any event, there were deposits of alluvial soil that were more hospitable than the marls to early farmers and herders.

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Site of Çatalhöyük, located in the semiarid Konya Basin of Anatolia (now central Turkey), comprises two mounds that accumulated as the settlement’s inhabitants repeatedly built, tore down, and rebuilt their mud-brick houses. The eastern mound, dating from 9,400 until 
8,000 years ago, has two "peaks," suggesting that the population may have been divided into two intermarrying kin groups. The western mound was occupied from about 8,000 until 7,700 years ago.   Maps by Joe LeMonnier (www.mapartist.com)

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One of the rivers in the Konya Basin was the Çarşamba, which spewed out into the plain and did not link to any other river system. Çatalhöyük was founded on its east bank, most likely on a small existing rise. (The river no longer runs by the site, having been diverted into irrigation channels.) The site would have been surrounded by marshy swamps in the spring, the results of the river’ s seasonal flooding.

Those observations partly explain the original siting of the town: Çatalhöyük was built where it was because, in a semiarid environment, people sought access to water and to soils as rich as possible in nutrients. But in that context, one of our recent findings carries surprising implications.

To learn where the crop plants found at Çatalhöyük were grown, we examined the evidence for phytoliths—silica skeletons that form inside and sometimes around the cells of grasses and other plants. Grasses that grow in moist, clay-rich soils have more soluble silica available for forming phytoliths than do grasses that grow in well-drained, dry-land soils.

As a result, large, composite phytoliths form in grasses from moist, clay-rich soils, built up from as many as a hundred or more adjacent cells. Given the ground conditions around Çatalhöyük, we expected to see evidence of such large phytoliths. But a sample of wheat-husk phytoliths studied by Arlene Rosen, an archaeologist at University College London, showed relatively few multicell clusters, suggesting that the wheat was cultivated in dry-land soils—and so not near the mound. Thus at least some of the agricultural fields appear to have been placed well away from the site.

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That finding suggested the question “why here?” might require a more complex answer. The wet marshes surrounding Çatalhöyük would certainly have offered a wide range of wild food resources, from fish and the eggs of waterfowl (both of which have been found on the site) to wild cattle and other mammals attracted by the water and by the fresh graze that grew on the alluvium.

Another attraction of the site might have been ready access to construction materials, which included the reeds people weaved into matting and incorporated into roofing and the mud made into bricks and plaster. In one area we excavated to the north of the large mound, we discovered many pits where the inhabitants had cut through a thin layer of alluvium in order to extract the underlying lime-rich marls.

Fragments scattered in the middens show that in the earliest levels of the site, floors were constructed out of hard, fired-lime plaster, but in later levels, the softer lime-rich mud plaster makes its appearance on the walls and floors. Firing lime requires a lot of fuel, and my guess is that the process became impractical because local sources of wood were used up.

In fact, there is good evidence that the Çatalhöyükans engaged in long-distance trade. Date-palm phytoliths at the site indicate that storage baskets were brought to Çatalhöyük from Mesopotamia or the Levant; shells suggest trade from the Red Sea and the Mediterranean; obsidian undoubtedly came from Cappadocia, a region about ninety miles to the northeast; oak and other timber must have come from at least as far as the nearest upland, six miles away.

But the Çatalhöyük economy was still primarily a subsistence one. The Çatalhöyükans grew their own cereals, such as emmer wheat, and legumes, such as peas and lentils; they raised their own sheep and goats; and, to a lesser extent, they hunted wild cattle.