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News: Underwater caves off Yucatan yield three old skeletons—remains date to 11,000 B.C.
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CATALHOYUK - UPDATES

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Bianca
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« Reply #45 on: August 21, 2007, 12:37:28 pm »


Excavations of the East Mound of Çatalhöyük, done by Mellaart in the 1960s, show that the buildings on the 33.5-acre mound were packed close together, without intervening streets or alleyways. Access to house interiors was originally across the roofs and down a stairway






Archaeologists today automatically assume that people cluster at a site not only for proximity to resources, but also for social reasons. For example, people may want to organize their labors, take part in community-wide rituals, or provide for defense against a common enemy. And some sites in Anatolia, earlier than Çatalhöyük, clearly emphasize that collective spirit. Art is concentrated in special ritual buildings, houses are laid out in zones, and human skulls are sometimes buried communally.

In contrast, a good case can be made that many aspects of life at Çatalhöyük were organized at the domestic, or household, scale. Brian F. Byrd, an archaeologist with the Far Western Anthropological Research Group in Davis, California, has noted that during the Neolithic there was a general shift in the southern Levant toward greater autonomy and complexity at the household level.

A similar historical shift can be readily traced in central Anatolia. For example, at Aşıklı Höyük, a site dating from about 10,700 until 9,300 years ago, there are ceremonial buildings, but the houses are much less elaborate than the ones at Çatalhöyük, where a wide range of functions, from burial, ritual, and art to storage, manufacture, and production were more clearly drawn into the house.
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« Reply #46 on: August 21, 2007, 12:41:41 pm »








Other evidence we have assembled is consistent with the view that the autonomous household at Çatalhöyük was the primary social unit. In size, for instance, Çatalhöyük might have been a town, but despite taking careful samples from the surface of the mound, we have found no evidence for public spaces, administrative buildings, or elite homes or quarters.

There were no streets, and in fact the buildings were embedded in extensive midden areas piled with trash, fecal material, and rotting organic material—not at all in accord with modern sensibilities. Perhaps it is little wonder that access to the houses was along the roofs and down some stairs!

The autonomy of the Çatalhöyük household is also reflected in how rarely two buildings shared a wall: even though houses might be just a few inches apart, people built and maintained their own walls. Each house was built with bricks of distinct composition or shape. The bins in the houses suggest they all had a similar storage capacity for agricultural produce. And each house seems to have had its own hearth, oven, obsidian cache, storage rooms, work rooms, and so on, for the inhabitants’ own activities.

Yet despite the central role of the individual household, my colleagues and I see hints that Çatalhöyükans were divided into two large groups throughout most of the time it was occupied. The contour of the larger mound reveals two built-up areas, a northern one and a southern one, with a gully between them.

A possible explanation is that Çatalhöyük was an endogamous culture, or in other words, people married within the settlement. It may have been organized, as are many other traditional societies, into two intermarrying kinship groups. Surveys in the plain around Çatalhöyük have turned up earlier and later sites, but none of them seem to have flourished at the same time—further evidence that marriage was probably a local affair.

The standard house had one main room, which accommodated an oven, a burial platform, and other platforms [see illustration below]. One or more side rooms served as storerooms, kitchen, and places for other domestic tasks. The stairs from the roof entrance—perhaps made of a log with steps notched in it—led into the main room. Walls were built of mud bricks and were windowless. On average, they were 1.3 feet thick and stood eight to ten feet high. The interior walls, floors, and posts for the roof were all plastered.
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« Reply #47 on: August 21, 2007, 12:42:54 pm »


Lower parts of walls, floor, and the main furnishings of a typical house at Çatalhöyük are depicted in this artist’s reconstruction. The house was inhabited about 8,500 years ago, and excavated by the author’s team in 1998 and 1999. The floors have not yet been excavated, but on the basis of similarities with other buildings at the site, the archaeologists expect to find burials beneath the mat-covered northwest platform.
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« Reply #48 on: August 21, 2007, 12:46:02 pm »








So far we have identified two kinds of cooking fires in Çatalhöyük: domed ovens were set into house walls, and hearths stood away from the walls. Collections of clay balls were often associated with the ovens.

According to research by Sonya L. Atalay, an archaeologist at Stanford University, the balls were used in cooking—just as, in many traditional societies, heated stones were put in a basket or skin container to boil water, or laid out to cook meat. Because stones are in short supply at Çatalhöyük, the clay balls served the same purpose.

At later levels, pottery containers, which could be placed directly over a fire, took over the heating function.

In the houses excavated so far, hearths and ovens were generally placed on the south side of the main rooms. In those areas the floor is blackened by the ash and charcoal raked out from the fires. Manufacturing activities were probably carried out there: we find evidence on the floors that obsidian was knapped, or chipped, into tools, that beads were made, that grease was extracted from animal bones.

Obsidian caches, as well as depressions for holding pots and other small stores, were often built below the floors. Little or no art appears in this “dirty” zone of the main room, and the only burials here seem to have been the bodies of newborns or infants.
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« Reply #49 on: August 21, 2007, 12:49:40 pm »






In contrast, the plaster floors and platforms in the rest of the main room are lighter in color, and sometimes even white. Ridges or platform edges often separate this area from the “dirty” zone. The “clean” areas often have higher platforms and more painting, and they are where burials were commonly made.

What points most to a household level of social organization is the rich symbolic content of the houses. Paintings depict vultures flying over headless human bodies, suggesting the practice, adopted in some parts of the world, of setting out the deceased so that they can be naturally defleshed.

Figurines depict generously proportioned females. One sculpture shows a female seated on a “throne” whose armrests are felines.

Recently we unearthed a male skull, perhaps belonging to a revered ancestor, over which plaster features had been periodically modeled and painted.

Eventually another person died—a female—and the skull was buried along with her [see photograph and illustrations below].


Skull of a male (top right), whose features had been repeatedly modeled in plaster and painted, is shown in an artist’s reconstruction. The skull was recently discovered in the burial of a female (photograph above); it may have belonged to a revered ancestor or relative of the deceased. The placement of the skull with respect to the female skeleton is shown in red outline in the diagram above.
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« Reply #50 on: August 21, 2007, 12:57:06 pm »








What particularly fascinates me are the many leopard motifs, including reliefs of paired leopards. The images suggest that a relationship with wild animals was a potent element in local religious ritual and belief. In line with that interpretation, the household shrines often incorporate the horns of a wild bull.

In contrast, the ancient artists neglected to represent most of the more mundane activities, such as the growing of crops. The emphasis on certain themes in the art appears significant, but from our distant vantage point, we can only glimpse how the people of Çatalhöyük interpreted the world around them.

Mellaart thought that some of the buildings in the settlement, because of their decorative and symbolic contents, might have been specialized shrines. We now understand them all as houses, but with varying degrees of ritual elaboration. In the plastered floor of what we call Building 1, for example, we discovered a complete fishhook pendant made from a split boar’ s tusk, apparently placed there intentionally.

A small plaster sculpture in the shape of an animal horn was inserted in one wall of the main room. We also found that two holes had been dug into the walls and then plastered over; we think they were made to contain objects that were later removed.

A small fragment of a figurine made of animal horn was embedded in the material used to construct an oven in a side room.

Perhaps those deposits were symbolically protective, or perhaps they represented memories, links with the past. We can’t really say, but in general terms they show that construction integrated ritual and daily practice.
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« Reply #51 on: August 21, 2007, 01:06:36 pm »







One clear result of the current excavations is the demonstration that most of the burials in the houses were of individual, fully fleshed bodies. Mellaart and his team had found jumbled, disarticulated human bones beneath the platforms in the main rooms. They assumed the bodies were initially buried elsewhere and then reburied beneath the platform floors. 

Baked clay figurine, about eight inches tall, was discovered by Mellaart in a grain bin. It was probably deposited there as an offering or memento when, in preparation for rebuilding the house, the inhabitants tore down the upper walls and filled in the foundation. Mellaart restored the missing heads of the seated woman and one of her feline armrests.
 
That idea was supported by the paintings of vultures apparently picking the flesh from headless human corpses. But our work shows that many bodies were buried under the platforms intact: the joints are still articulated and the smallest bones (often lost in reburial) are present. The jumbled nature of the bones beneath some platforms, we have concluded, was the result of inserting later graves within the same platform, a frequent practice.

Perhaps the most telling evidence for the symbolic importance of the house in life at Çatalhöyük is the meticulous procedure the inhabitants followed when—for structural or other reasons—they decided a house had to be torn down and rebuilt.

To prepare for rebuilding, workers first cleaned and scoured the walls and plaster features of the original house. Then they removed the roof, dug out the main support posts, and dismantled the walls, usually down to a height of three or four feet. Fixtures such as ovens and decorative or ritual elements were often removed or truncated. The old house was then filled with a mixture of building materials, often very carefully.

For example, to preserve the dome of the oven in one building, soil was fed in through the side opening. The fill material commonly included various artifacts—bone points, hunks of obsidian, stone axes. How many such objects were ritual placements as opposed to accidental losses is not always clear, but there are patterns to the work.

The enthroned female figurine with felines, which Mellaart discovered in a bin, seems to have been placed there for some symbolic motive.
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« Reply #52 on: August 21, 2007, 01:09:52 pm »







Before the current project began excavating houses in 1995, I had assumed we would just dig down and find houses frozen in time, static entities rather like the ones I had seen represented in Mellaart’ s reconstructions. But what we really discovered were processes.

The new excavations show how the inhabitants of Çatalhöyük were always tinkering with the internal details of their homes. The various areas of a house might have had prescribed differences in flooring, height, color, plaster, matting, and so forth. But there were also continual adjustments in the course of daily life, as the spaces were remade, reworked, moved, or used for different purposes.

Can we begin to understand what it was like to live in the houses of Çatalhöyük? It is often said that they were dark inside. But an experimental house built at the site by Mirjana Stevanoviĉ, an archaeologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has shown that during the day so much light pours in from the stair entry that the main room is quite bright. 
                                         
Excavators recently unearthed this two-inch-wide stamp or seal, probably used for imprinting cloth or skin. It appears to represent a bear. Excavators had previously found sculptured reliefs inside the houses, with similarly posed limbs, but the heads and hands had always been removed. Some had interpreted them as goddess figures. Now it is assumed that they, too, were animal images.
 
Since the white plastered walls were so frequently renewed and often burnished, they reflected the light well. Even the side rooms got some reflected light; as one’ s eyes adjusted to the relative gloom, it would have been possible to carry out indoor activities.

A child growing up in such a household would soon learn how the space was organized—where to bury the dead and where to make beads, where to find the obsidian cache and where to place offerings. Eventually, he or she would learn how to rebuild the house itself.

Thus the rules of society were transferred not through some centralized control, but through the daily practices of the household. All those practices were carried out in the presence of dead ancestors and within a symbolic world immediately at hand, conveyed through rich artistic representation.

But why such a large settlement should flourish precisely when and where it did still eludes us. Perhaps it enabled people to build up a network of relationships that would serve to control access to resources.

Living close together meant that those relationships could be continually reinforced and monitored. By joining with others at the one site, each household could also better promote its own interests: finding marriage partners for its young people, developing exchange alliances, cementing links through ancestry, and so on.
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« Reply #53 on: August 21, 2007, 01:13:15 pm »





But why such a large settlement should flourish precisely when and where it did still eludes us. Perhaps it enabled people to build up a network of relationships that would serve to control access to resources. Living close together meant that those relationships could be continually reinforced and monitored. By joining with others at the one site, each household could also better promote its own interests: finding marriage partners for its young people, developing exchange alliances, cementing links through ancestry, and so on.

But then again, we know that some evidence could suddenly emerge to suggest a quite different explanation. And so our excavations, and our informed speculations, will continue.
http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/master.html?http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/0606/0606_feature_lowres.html








Since 1993, archaeologist Ian Hodder has been leading the excavation of Çatalhöyük, a 9,000-year-old Neolithic site in central Turkey. The project aims to place the abundant art from the site in its full economic, environmental, and social context; to conserve the paintings, plasters, and mud walls; and to present the site to the public. Further information and images about the site are available on the Web (www.catalhoyuk.com). Hodder is currently the Dunlevie Family Professor in the department of cultural and social anthropology at Stanford University. His article in this issue has been adapted from his forthcoming book, The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük, which is being published by Thames & Hudson. 


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« Reply #54 on: August 23, 2007, 01:11:50 pm »


Artist's reconstruction of the site during spring floods (John-Gordon Swogger 2001)
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« Reply #55 on: August 23, 2007, 01:41:37 pm »

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« Reply #56 on: August 23, 2007, 01:45:17 pm »

It’s probably the most famous parturient-woman sculpture in the world, at least if you’re interested in Neolithic archaeology. It’s a mother goddess from Catal Hoyuk in Turkey, and it dates from the 7th millennium B.C.

It depicts a pregnant woman in the act of giving birth. The Catal Hoyuk piece shows the newborn’s head (a rather shapeless lump) emerging from between its mother’s thighs. The Catal Hoyuk goddess is flanked by two lionesses. The Catal Hoyuk goddess is seated majestically on a throne.  Lionesses are a common ancient motif indicating royalty and power over nature. The Catal Hoyuk goddess is corpulent, representing her boundless fertility to nurture life.
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« Reply #57 on: August 29, 2007, 01:27:57 am »

Yes, Catal Hoyuk is the place where the mother goddess and bull worship most likely originated.  Turkey is also where the oldest metal swords and the first castles were found. 

It also hold the legend of Tantalus, the Lydian Atlas!

I am certain that it is the place that Plato spoke of when he mentioned Atlantis, but the government does not allow much archaeological work to be done, so much has yet to be proven.
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« Reply #58 on: April 24, 2008, 11:13:43 am »










                                                     The Seeds of Civilization





Why did humans first turn from nomadic wandering to villages and togetherness?

The answer may lie in a 9,500-year-old settlement in central Turkey



By Michael Balter
Smithsonian magazine,
May 2005

Basak Boz looked up from the disarticulated human skeleton spread out on the laboratory bench in
front of her.

The archaeologist standing in the lab doorway shuffled his dusty boots apologetically. “It looks like something really important this time,” he said.

Building 42 is one of more than a dozen mud-brick dwellings under excavation at Catalhoyuk, a 9,500-year-old Neolithic, or New Stone Age, settlement that forms a great mound overlooking fields of wheat and melon in the Konya Plain of south-central Turkey. In the previous two months, archaeologists working on Building 42 had uncovered the remains of several individuals under its white plaster floors, including an adult, a child and two infants. But this find was different. It was the body of a woman who had been laid on her side, her legs drawn to her chest in a fetal position. Her arms, crossed over her chest, seemed to be cradling a large object.

Boz, a physical anthropologist at HacettepeUniversity in Ankara, Turkey, walked up a hill to Building
42. She took out a set of implements, including an oven baster for blowing off dust and a small scalpel,
and set to work. After about an hour, she noticed a powdery white substance around the object the skeleton cradled.

“Ian!” she said, beaming. “It’s a plastered skull!” Ian Hodder, the StanfordUniversity archaeologist who directs the Catalhoyuk excavations, was making his morning rounds of the 32-acre site. He crouched next to Boz to take a closer look. The skull’s face was covered with soft, white plaster, much of it painted ochre, a red pigment. The skull had been given a plaster nose, and its eye sockets had been filled with plaster. Boz could not be sure if the skull was male or female at first, but from the close knitting of the suture in the cranium (which closes as people age), she could tell that it belonged to
an older person; later testing showed it was a woman’s.

Since researchers first began digging at Catalhoyuk (pronounced “Chah-tahl-hew-yook”) in the 1960s, they’ve found more than 400 skeletons under the houses, which are clustered in a honeycomb-like maze. Burying the dead under houses was common at early agricultural villages in the Near East—at Catalhoyuk, one dwelling alone had 64 skeletons. Plastered skulls were less common and have been found at only one other Neolithic site in Turkey, though some have been found in the Palestinian-controlled city of Jericho and at sites in Syria and Jordan. This was the first one ever found at Catalhoyuk—and the first buried with another human skeleton. The burial hinted at an emotional bond between two people. Was the plastered skull that of a parent of the woman buried there nine millennia ago?

Hodder and his colleagues were also working to decipher paintings and sculptures found at Catalhoyuk. The surfaces of many houses are covered with murals of men hunting wild deer and cattle and of vultures swooping down on headless people. Some plaster walls bear bas-reliefs of leopards and apparently female figures that may represent goddesses. Hodder is convinced that this symbol-rich settlement, one of the largest and best-preserved Neolithic sites ever discovered, holds the key to prehistoric psyches and to one of the most fundamental questions about humanity: why people first settled in permanent communities.



http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/seeds_civilization.html
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« Reply #59 on: April 25, 2008, 09:34:15 am »








In the millennia before Catalhoyuk’s flowering, most of the Near East was occupied by nomads who hunted gazelle, sheep, goats and cattle, and gathered wild grasses, cereals, nuts and fruits. Why, beginning about 14,000 years ago, did they take the first steps toward permanent communities, settling together in stone houses and eventually inventing farming? Afew millennia later, as many as 8,000 people gathered in Catalhoyuk, and they stayed put for more than a thousand years, building and rebuilding houses packed so closely together that residents had to enter through the roofs.

“The formation of the first communities was a major turning point in humanity’s development, and the people of Catalhoyuk seem to have pushed the idea to an extreme,” says Hodder. “But we are still left with the question of why they would bother to come together in such numbers in the first place.”

For decades, it seemed that Catalhoyuk’s mysteries might never be explored. James Mellaart, a British archaeologist, discovered the site in 1958 and made it famous. But his research was cut short in 1965, after Turkish authorities withdrew his excavation permit after alleging he was involved in the Dorak Affair, a scandal in which important Bronze Age artifacts reportedly went missing. Mellaart was not formally charged, and a committee of distinguished archaeologists later exonerated him of any role in the affair. Still, he was never allowed back at the site, and it sat neglected for nearly 30 years.
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