Good evening. Hi, my name is Wally Verdooren. I'm the Director of Development here at the Oriental Institute. Welcome to another
monthly members' lecture here at the Oriental Institute. We also want to
welcome all those who are joining us online via live streaming, so greetings
to our virtual fans of the ancient Middle Eastern Studies wherever you may
be around the world. Tonight's lecture is also particularly special because our
speaker is the annual Braidwood Visiting Scholar at the OI. As many of you
know, this annual visiting scholar program was created through the generous
support of family members and friends to honor Robert and Linda Braidwood, two
prolific, even legendary, OI archaeologists, who you will be hearing a
bit more about in just a few minutes. I also want to extend my personal
greetings and thanks to Gretel Braidwood who is here with us tonight. Gretel is
Robert and Linda's daughter, who truly grew up at the Oriental Institute and at
archaeological expeditions across the Near East that were led by her parents.
If you haven't met Gretel yet, I hope you do because I have to tell you she has
stories. In fact, Gretel would like to say just a few words to us and so I'd
like to welcome her up to the podium. Wally's right when he talks about
growing up here at the Institute. I did in part when we weren't out in the field and I,
for any of you who are docents or have been docents, I will be one of the people
you would have slapped because I was able to pat the nose of the bull in the
Persian Hall as a child and various other things, which are simply verboten
now. I've talked about how the program was created before and so I'm not gonna
go there particularly. But because we're in the centennial year, I want to tell
you a little bit about how my parents fit into this hundred-year time frame.
Bob and Linda died 16 years ago and they kept their old passports and I have them
in a drawer. And I used the passports last week to get my numbers straight.
They were Oriental Institute archaeologists for many years. My dad
first went into the field for the OI in 1933, 86 years ago, and they went as a team the year that they were married in 1937, which was 82 years ago. Those early years
were in the Amuq. Later they worked in Iraq, Iran, and, from 1964 on, in eastern
Turkey. In 1994 after 61 years in the field for my dad and almost as many for
my mother, they made their last field trip to
Turkey for the Institute. After their deaths in 2003 and using gifts that were made
in their memory, we created the program. And it is this program. All of us who are
hearing Ian Hodder tonight are getting a special treat because the program was
actually created for the Institute students and there have been workshops
for a couple of days, but fortunately the visiting scholars are always willing to
give a members' lecture as well. So Chris. Before we move on, I also want of course
to express my thanks to all the OI members who are here with us tonight
both in person as well as online. The annual and ongoing support from our
members makes possible programs like our monthly lecture series and also provides
resources to the pioneering research and discovery that is still being led by so
many OI faculty and researchers. If you're not a member yet, consider joining
and supporting all the scholarly adventures at the OI. And so let's get
our lecture program started. And I now have the pleasure of introducing
Christopher Woods, the Johnny Wilson professor and the Director of the
Oriental Institute. Thank you, Wally, and thank you all for coming out. Good
evening. Welcome to this year, our centennial year's Braidwood lecture. I
would like to begin by thanking Gretel Braidwood and Ray Tindel for their
wonderful support of the Braidwood Visiting Scholar Program, which began, as
you heard, in 2003 and now is an annual event. The Braidwoods, in many ways, are
the first family of the Oriental Institute. They're part of the very
fabric of this place. Gretel, as you heard, virtually grew up at the OI, was a
regular presence on OI excavations in Iraq and Turkey led by her parents Bob
and Linda, and she worked here 30 years at the University as a Development
Officer, including a period here at the OI. Ray, her husband, is an OI
institution in his own right. He worked at the OI for 32 years and was
Registrar and Senior Curator when he retired in 2007. Bob Braidwood, whose
memory and accomplishments we honor with these lectures, also spent his entire
academic career here at the OI, having been hired first by James Henry Breasted
himself, the founder of the OI, in 1933. Throughout Bob's astounding career
he worked in close partnership with his wife, Linda, who, like Bob, did her
graduate work here at Chicago. There isn't time tonight to do anything
approaching justice to Bob Braidwood's career. I would simply note that more
than any other scholar Bob Braidwood shaped the modern, scientific, and
multidisciplinary study of archaeology as a discipline. He pioneered the methods
of landscape archaeology and was a leading light in understanding the
absolutely critical, but at that time still neglected, phase of the human
career that saw the transition from nomadic hunting and gathering to
domestication, which set the stage for civilization. And, of course, I would be
remiss if I didn't point out that Bob Braidwood is often considered an
inspiration behind Indiana Jones. It is now my honor to introduce this year's
Braidwood Visiting Scholar and one of the true giants of archaeology today,
Professor Ian Hodder. Professor Hodder was trained at the Institute of
Archaeology, University College London, and at Cambridge University where he obtained his PhD in 1975. After a brief period teaching at Leeds, he returned to
Cambridge where he taught until 1999. During that time he became Professor of
Archaeology and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. In 1999 he joined
the faculty at Stanford University and as the Dunlevie Family Professor in the
Department of Anthropology and as Director of the Stanford Archaeology
Center. Professor Hodder's main large-scale excavation projects have been at Haddenham in the east of England and, of course, at Çatalhöyük in Turkey, where he
worked from 1993 to 2018. Professor Hodder has received a truly astounding
number of important international awards and prizes. To name just a few,
he's been awarded the Oscar Montelius Medal of the Swedish Society of
Antiquaries, the Huxley Memorial Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute, the
Fyssen International Prize, the Gold Medal by
the Archaeological Institute of America, and has honorary Doctorate, Doctorates,
from both Bristol and Leiden Universities. In 2019 he was appointed a
Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in the Queen's Honor List.
Professor Hodder's main books include Spatial Analysis in Archaeology 1976,
Symbols in Action 1982, Reading the Past 1986, The Domestication of Europe 1990, The Archaeological Process 1999, The Leopards Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of
Çatalhöyük 2006, and Entangled: An Archaeology of the
Relationships Between Humans and Things 2012, among, incredibly, other monographs. Additionally, there are literally hundreds of articles to his credit.
Tonight Professor Hodder will describe his 25 spectacular years excavating at
Çatalhöyük. So without further ado please join me in welcoming our
Braidwood Visiting Scholar, Professor Ian Hodder. Thank you very much for that overly
generous introduction and I'm very grateful to the OI for inviting me to
give the Braidwood lecture and it's a great pleasure to be here. So thank you
very much. I put this first slide up because I
wanted to thank the people who have been involved in the Çatalhöyük Project for 25
years. And much of what I say, or all of what I'll say tonight is, it's really a
product of the joint work of a large team. But I've also put it up because I
wanted to say how pleased I am to give a lecture in honor of Braidwood
because, in many ways, I see the work that we did at Çatalhöyük as a sort of
modern development and extension of the sorts of approaches that Robert and
Linda Braidwood pioneered in the 30s onwards. And in particular the way
that they pioneered the importance of bringing in lots of different
specialists, natural scientists, to work alongside archaeologists to build
a picture through a collaborative process. And I like to think if they
were here tonight, they would see really the development of their work into the
modern era where we have about 34. I mean when the Braidwoods were working, they talked about having four or five natural scientists, the various
sources: zooarchaeologists and the paleobotanists and a soil person and so
on. We now have 34 different types of our scientific specialists that we work with.
And so I hope very much that the work I'll talk to you about today is
in the spirit of the sort of approaches that they championed. So I want to start
by just telling you a little bit very briefly about Çatalhöyük and then I'm
going to go just into a series of specific questions and issues that
I'll talk about. So I've discovered this great new
technology with my thing here so that I can show you things in detail. So
I'm going to play with this all night, that's really wonderful. The East Mound at Çatalhöyük, where the main Neolithic sequences [unintelligible]. If we look into these two
shelters, in the north shelter this is what we're looking at. And what we're
trying to do here is understand the way that the site was organized at one
moment in time. And I'll come back to the houses that we found here in this
northern area. And in the southern area we have a slightly different focus, which
is to look at the development of the site through time. And the change is
a material culture and a social organization that we see through the
sequence. And that this gives you an idea of what that sequence looks like, where
we start at the base down here, where we are clearly outside the settlement, and this
is refuse. The main settlement is somewhere over here. And this is at about
7,100 BC, 7100 BC, right at the bottom here. And then there are a series
of houses. You can see the walls of the houses being built up over time through
this area. And then around 6,500 there's a sort of hiatus and that there are again
houses at the top, but they're, there is less of an organized pattern of
house built on house over time. So basically in the northern area we've
been focusing on how this society is organized at one moment in
time, and in the southern area we're looking at change through time. And
there's obviously many many different things that I could focus on in talking
about them, but what I've decided to do is just concentrate on five themes. They
give you an in—so I can show you some of the ways in which our methods
have led to new interpretations of this Neolithic site. So we're looking at the
landscape and the environment. Look at how big the site was. Look at questions
of social organization, hierarchy, and other types of social organization, and
then I'll talk fairly briefly about change through time in the sequence
towards the end. So in terms of landscape and environment, one of the
interesting things about working with a team over 25 years is that new members
join the team and the team changes. And as the team changes, what one tends to
find is that the new members of the team want to overturn the ideas of
the previous members of the team. So there's always a transformation and this
happens very, has happened, very much with landscape and environment. So the
original work that was done trying to reconstruct what the landscape around
Çatalhöyük was like argued that the site was located in a large flat plain
that was originally a Pleistocene lake that then dried up and then there were
alluvial deposits that were brought into this flat Pleistocene zone. And that the
this alluvial material was very attractive to early agriculture and a
series of sites were attracted and the biggest of these alluvial fans in the Konya plain is where Çatalhöyük is located. But the river that
created that alluvium also kept bringing down water and the argument was, that by
coring through the land around Çatalhöyük, there seem to be a lot of very
wet type of deposits, that sort of back swamp clay. And it was argued that in
fact Çatalhöyük was located in a wetland that was seasonally flooded,
extremely badly flooded, so that it was impossible for fields to be right by the
site. Now we know from the seeds and the plant and the animal bones on the
site that this is a fully agricultural settlement. And so it became really
problematic to argue that the land around the site was very wet. In fact,
these are early paleoenvironmentalists, in my project, [who] argued that the fields
must have been about 12 kilometers away. People were going quite a long distance in
order to get to the fields. So when a new group of paleoenvironmentalists arrived,
they didn't like this idea of going over, you know, going long
distances to the fields. And so they decided to re-look at the data and they
did a whole series of new coring around the site. And so you can
see up here, but here's the East Mound and the West Mound.
And these are the cores that they they were digging all the way around
through the alluvium down into the Pleistocene marl in order to get a
sequence of environmental change through time. And what they found, what
was in fact the original Pleistocene marl, was very undulating with lots
of hills and hummocks. It wasn't flat at all in the end. And there was lots of
evidence of these small channels that were going through this landscape. And so
they ended up saying that what really we had was some sort of deltaic type of
pattern, as you can see in these reconstructions. And so for them, they
argue that in the Late Pleistocene you have this one river going through this
landscape and then through time this river starts branching.
But by the time of Çatalhöyük, the East Mound, you have a very complex
dendritic system of small channels that were not producing large amounts of
water in great sheets, but were leaving dry hillocks between the little channels.
So it was a mosaic of a wetland and dry, dry hummocks creating a very diverse,
very rich landscape with lots of different types of resources from
everything from fish and snails and so on through to good grazing for animals
and for cereals. And then in the period after the the East Mound, when the West
Mound is constructed, you get a continuation of this sort of very
dendritic pattern. So this is how we now see the landscape of Çatalhöyük:
as a rich mosaic of a great variety of different types of environment that
could be exploited, and also of different types of clay, because you've got this
Pleistocene marl and you've got this alluvium coming down. And Çatalhöyük is
really built of clay, all of everything there really, there's very
little stone in this area so everything is made of mud, dried mud brick
houses and ceramic pottery and so on, a very extensive dependence on clay. So in a way you can also see there the
importance of having a long-term project. If we had just stopped after ten years
we would have had the wrong answers and so going on and developing over time is
important. The second thing I want to talk about is population estimates. The East Mound is itself quite large, it's about 13 hectares, but it's very
difficult to know what that means in terms of population size. These types of sites in this type of period, people would
have tended to argue that the population sizes must have been quite small. However, when we started working out what we thought was the number of people
who could live on the East Mound, we got figures between 3,500 and 8,000.
And this was work that someone called Craig Cessford did in 2005. Now there are a
series of sites in the seventh millennium in the Middle East
that are known as mega-sites that do indeed seem to be very large, but there
are other people who argue that this can't really be possible.
These are societies which do have agriculture, but it's not
extremely intensive agriculture and they seem to be relatively egalitarian. In
other words, not to have centralized elites of some sort and we'll come back
to that later. But if you've got a fairly egalitarian society with relatively
small-scale agriculture, where they're still hunting and gathering to a large
degree, how is it possible to have as much as 3,500 or 8,000 people living
together without violence and conflicts and so on. And so other people like
these guys here have argued recently that this must be a massive
overestimation because of something called scalar stress. So what they're
saying is that you simply can't have that number of people together without
some sort of centralized organization: some leaders, some chiefs, some central
bureaucracy. Otherwise you get too much stress of things again, either
controlled or too much violence. So they're saying in fact that the numbers must be
wildly wrong and we must be talking really about a few hundred or maybe a
thousand people. So what I want to do is to point out to you that it is
actually extremely difficult to work out how many people were living at Çatalhöyük at any one time. You've seen that we've only excavated in two areas,
the northern area and the southern area. What about the whole of the rest of
the map? Well we have done a lot of surface pick-up, a sort of
collecting stuff on the surface of the mound and also doing scrapes at
intervals across the mound in order to find out what the latest occupation
looked like. But both of those methods are only telling you the latest
occupation; they're not telling you about what's going on farther down. One of the
things that one can try and use is ground-penetrating radar, which looks
down into the ground. But Çatalhöyük is 21 meters high and this type of
technique can only go down something like three or four meters. But
nevertheless it does give us something more than just surface
collection. And what this showed was an interesting pattern around the
northern shelter. So this here is the, that sort of shape in the middle is an
area I'll show you soon, is where we've been excavating in the North Shelter. But
all around it, we have these traces of walls that seem to be on a north-south
or west-east alignment and all the buildings in here have that same
alignment. So we think that these are traces of neolithic houses that
extended around the excavated area. When we get to the skirts of the mound, up
here, the overburden of eroded soil is such, so much that we can't
see through it. But as far as we've been able
to show with ground-penetrating radar, it does seem that what we have at Çatalhöyük is a dense occupation over the whole site. And we don't see anything
different; we don't see big plazas or big administrative centers or big
temples or anything like that. As far as we can interpret from this, we're just
looking at lots and lots of houses all packed together. So I've now gone
into that northern area that was in the middle of that and we're looking at, this
is the area the way we've been excavating. And you can see on the whole
that, despite some change in angle here, but most of the houses are on the same
sort of north-south, west-east alignment, which seems to be true of the
whole site. So you would have thought that we can just take a plan like this
of the houses at Çatalhöyük and then make some assumption about how many
people lived in the houses and then multiply that and get a population
estimate. And that's the sort of approach that Craig Cessford used. But there are a
lot of assumptions in that. This is how the site looks when we take off the
topsoil and start excavating. These are the buildings that we see. But can we be
sure that each of these buildings is really contemporary? But when I showed
you the section earlier on, I showed how you have these houses that are building
up in these long columns: a house built on top of a house built on top of a
house. See, so what Çatalhöyük consists of a lot
of the time is these columns of houses that are rebuilt on top of each other
and then next door there's another column of houses and then another column of houses and they don't necessarily interact very much or intersect. So
there's very little stratigraphical key that allows you to say exactly whether
these houses are really contemporary. And so the way that we've been trying
to explore this issue is by using radiocarbon dating
allied with Bayesian statistics. And so —what we've been—we have about 600
dates from the new excavations at Çatalhöyük and in this area there's
about a hundred and sixty dates, and what we're trying to do is to use these
new dating methods to get very precise ideas of how long each house was lived in
and which houses were contemporary. What this method does is it links the
radiocarbon dating with our prior information about the stratagraphical
relationships that we do have. And so what I'm going to show you now, this is
work done by Alex Bayliss and Burcu Tung, is to give you a sense of what the settlement pattern in the North Area looked like, so in this area here,
in 25-year sections. So we're going back to 665O BC in 25-year blocks
to 6,400 BC. So what this is doing is saying that in a 25-year plan segment of time, we know which buildings
have the highest probability of being occupied during that period based on the
radiocarbon dates. And so what this is showing here is that in this
earliest phase, there are a series of buildings, but there is also
a large area of midden or open area, which is shown here. So this is
this open area and then there's a series of buildings that were built
next to it. If we go to the next 25-year phase, we see that that's changing and that there's less, there's more midden or open area or refuse areas
between the houses, there's less of that and more buildings. And then that shifts
again and then towards the later part we begin to get something else that emerges,
which is houses that are left abandoned so that they are sort of vacant lots. So
at this point you have houses of the lived-in, you have open areas where open
activities and refuse deposition is going on, and then you have these vacant
lots— these are buildings that are just left.
And if you go on through time, you find that that changes. So that by the end of
the occupation there are quite a lot of vacant lots. I've only just
got this stuff yesterday and so I'm, I sort of want to play with it a bit. So if
you go through it quickly it's like you you see, sorry, I'm going too fast, oh dear,
what have I done? Here we go. So we're going back through time now. But you see these trends that initially you've got a lot of open space
and then that gets broken down and then you start to get lots of empty lots
until you end up with a lot of empty lots and then the area gets abandoned. So
I'm just enjoying doing this so I'm gonna keep doing it, sorry.
It's like you'll get in a 25-year move— this is very unusual for the
sites this early to be able to do this, this is why I'm excited by it. To be
able to sort of see these sort of changes through time. And the changes
that you see, particularly the shift from a lot of open space to less open
space, and then the shift to vacant lots is something that we find elsewhere on
the site so it's a real pattern that one can talk about. So I'll just go through
it again. So anyway it's clear then that working at the
population size is—you would get different results as you go through time.
And so it becomes relatively meaningless to try and work out what the population
is. The—we of course we're only looking at a short small window, we don't
really know what's happening in the whole of the rest of Çatalhöyük,
although as I said we do have similar sequences in the South. But what we can
do is say that if we go back through time to the place—the time—when the
there is most least vacant lots and most use of space, we can take these sorts of
moments in time and work out what is the maximum type of—maximum population—if the whole of the site was like this. And if we do that, we we do get two numbers
that are it's impossible to bring them down to sort of one thousand or a few
hundred. If you take this particular map and generalize for the rest of the
site you get numbers again around five thousand five hundred. So it's very
difficult to see unless there's something very different going on
somewhere that we don't know about. It's very difficult to see how we can get the
population down very markedly. So it seems to me that Craig Cessford was
right when he had those initial estimates. But the important point is
that it changes a lot through time. And just as an archaeological point
it just shows that when you see these sorts of maps of houses and on a
site you know it's really important to be suspicious about whether they're
really or contemporary or not. So if it is a place then that we have a lot of
people living very tightly packed together in this sort of way as at
Çatalhöyük, so tightly packed together that there are not streets. That people are moving around on the surface of the mound—on the surface of the houses—on the roofs of the houses going down on, from the roofs into these small buildings. If you've got this very tightly packed system, why is it that you
don't have total chaos, if you don't have strong leadership? And one of the ways
that we've been exploring this is to look at whether we do have, in fact,
evidence of violence on the skeletal remains.
So people were buried beneath the floors of the houses at Çatalhöyük. When we
excavate them do we find lots of evidence of violence? Well, one of the
things that we don't find is arrowheads or spear heads stuck in bodies. We don't
find clear evidence of parry fractures on arms and so on that we don't find a
lot of evidence of people. But I don't think there's any evidence of any person
who died as a result of those sorts of wounds at Çatalhöyük, so there is no,
there is no—many archaeologists find on other sites, things arrowheads stuck in
spines and so on, we just haven't got that. The early people who worked
on the human remains at Çatalhöyük—the early part of my project there—they
argue that there was no evidence of violence at Çatalhöyük. But again
when a new set of human remains people came along, they didn't like that idea.
They said what we're going to prove is this is wrong. And so they looked back at
all the evidence and they came up with evidence of violence. And this is the
main type of evidence they found, which is a blunt force trauma on the skull. So
there's lots of evidence of bashing the skull, particularly in the position that
you can see on the right there. But it's important to recognize
that none of this led to death. This is a type of injury that people continued
living with. And so it's also difficult to interpret exactly what
caused this. But one idea is that it's a sort of ritualized violence, some
sort of ritual fighting of some sort that led to these types of wounds. We
can't really say that, of course, but in a way this type of evidence suggests
even more that there is an interesting question: which is how do you organize
the society so that you don't have violence that leads to death? The
violence is somehow controlled in some way or other. So are there in fact elites
or ritual leaders or some sort of chiefs of some sort at Çatalhöyük that could
have somehow managed or leave this large population without having a large amount
of violence? And I'm going to talk about hierarchy then and something that we
call the history house. So I've talked about how at Çatalhöyük you have these
columns of houses. People live in one house. They then after 30 or a hundred
years, somewhere between that, they knocked down the upper part of the house.
They fill in the lower part of the house and then they build another house on top
of the walls of the previous house. And then they carry on doing that sometimes
in long columns of houses. And it's these buildings that we've started, or I've
started, to call history houses, but it's a slightly more complicated definition
than that. It's not the case that all houses are like this. Some houses are
built out onto midden, some houses are abandoned and they become midden, or
refuse areas, but some houses continue through time. So the question is why do
some houses do this and some houses not? And it's these houses that
continue over a long period of time that tend to be also the
ones that have most elaborate symbolism in them. So, for example, in this house
here we have these are the walls of the house and then this is a platform with a
bull's horns placed around the platform. This is a small bull's head here and
there was painting and so on also around this platform. Or here's
another example where you've got a bench with lots of bull's horns and a big
bull's head put, placed, in a niche in the wall. These sorts of things are
very reminiscent of what Mellaart called shrines. So he also found these more elaborate buildings, which he thought were shrines and that they were not domestic houses.
But what we're sure of is that all houses at Çatalhöyük have domestic
activity and they're all domestic houses, but some of them have more of this
ritual stuff than others. And beneath the floors of the houses you have large
numbers of burials. So you can have up to 62 people buried beneath the floor of
the house. This suggests that people are being buried into the house from other
houses, as if these more elaborate houses with long continuity attracted
burial from other houses. So we can show this in various graphs. This is a graph
that tries to show the number of houses built on top of each other on the
horizontal axis. So whether it's 2, 4, 6, or 8 houses built on top of each other and
then it's looking at the number of burials. And you see that the more houses
you have on top of each other, the more likely you are to have a lot of burials
in the houses. So that suggests that there's something distinctive about
these houses that have repeatedly [been] rebuilt in the same location. Or here's
another example of a relationship between the number of burials, number of
individuals buried, and the elaboration index, which means, which is an index of
how many bulls horns and other installations and sculptures there are
in the house. So this is, you see, there's a positive relation there, which suggests
in the completely excavated buildings, but the more elaborate buildings have
more people buried in them. So what we're finding then, is that
there are these houses that are built over a long period of time, completely
often rebuilt in the same place, that have more ritual in them and they have
more burials. So you might have thought, aha, these are your elites, these are the
chiefs, these are the people who are organizing and
controlling society. The trouble is that we can't find anything that correlates
with this. So, for example, here we're looking at the elaboration index again,
which is this measure of how elaborate a building is in terms of bull's horns and
things. And this is the percentage of the house that is used for
storage and production. And you see there isn't any relationship. It's not the case
that the more elaborate buildings, the ones with the more burials, also have
more storage and more space for production. And we find this
over and over again. Everything we look at doesn't show a relationship. So
it's not the case that these more elaborate buildings control production;
that they have more evidence of sort of stone tool production, for example, or
grinding production or anything or richer artifacts. So this seems to be a
type of society where there were religious elites that then somehow
controlled burial and history, but they were not able to translate that type of
control, that type of ritual and social control, into the control of production.
So these are not elites in a sort of more typical
sense. But again I want to emphasize how difficult it is to make
these types of argument. And I've sort of blithely put up these charts as if these
points are all contemporary or that each house can be talked about in some
aggregate way. What we've actually found at Çatalhöyük is that houses go
through very very complex histories. So this is an example of work done by Wendy
Matthews and Aroa Garcia. And what we're looking at here is the plaster on
the walls of the houses and you can see that all, how well you can see, but,
for example, here you have lots and lots of layers of plaster on the walls and
very very fine thin layers here. So sometimes you can have up to 250
layers of plaster on the wall where people have been replastering it. And
sometimes it's very fine plaster. We think they've been doing this almost
monthly, so a monthly rewashing, we're putting new plaster whitewash on the
wall. And so that means that at Çatalhöyük— that we have an amazing record of the
history of what's going on in a house. So, for example, up here look at all
these layers of plaster that have been put on, this is some ridge on the wall.
Look how each of these is very fine—a sort of foundation layer—and a
fine layer of white plaster. And you can follow through here and look at these
very fine layers. So you're looking at month after month, year after year, as I
said sometimes hundreds and hundreds of these layers that you can follow through
time. And here's another sequence here. And then you can look more closely here,
expand that and you see that you got sort of painting. So some of these layers
of plaster are painted. So this gives you the opportunity to look, well
at one level it's a real headache, because how do you dig this
archaeologically? I mean this is why it can take up to nine years to dig a house
at Çatalhöyük because you're trying to take these layers off very, very
carefully and follow these sequences of activity on the walls and on the floors. This is another way of looking at the
same thing, in this case on the floors. So this is a particular house here and
we're taking a section through the floors here from the southern dirty
floor, so we call them, to the northern clean floors.
So here the southern dirty floors, they're going over this bench here, going
over the bench then along here to the northern part of the site. And it's
always in the northern part of the house that you get burials and so you get
these burials cut from some of these floors but not from all of them. And so
when I was sort of saying ok, well, we got so many people buried in this house and
so much elaboration in the house, that's all really undermined by the fact that
these houses go through these complex histories and sometimes there are
burials and sometimes there are not. And someone called Kevin Kay has been very
interested in trying to understand this type of sequence. And what he's looking
here, what he's done here, is take a particular building, say building 77, and
looks through time. This isn't dated time it's just sort of sequences of events,
through the sequence, and has looked at the number of burials. And you see that
the burials die out in the later part of the occupation of this house, whereas
various types of painting and sculpture continue on through this later phase. So
when I said simply earlier on that, you know, there's a correlation between the
amount of burials and the amount of elaboration, that's not exactly true. It
is true if you take the aggregate of the house, but in actual, any particular
moment, that may not be true. And so making these arguments about
social organization and hierarchy and so on, but need to take that type of
complexity into account. And a final graph on this theme I said how
difficult it was to find any evidence of relationships between things like
burials and amount of elaboration in the house. But if we do take the aggregate of
those things for any particular house, I just want to
emphasize that we do not find any relationship between the number of
burials and the amount of elaboration in a house and anything else. So this
is looking at the number of inclusions in graves. So we're looking at the
percentage of individuals with associations. So, in other words,
what this person is doing, Milena Vasić, what she's done is looked at the
burials in the houses and see which of those have things added into the graves
to make them sort of richer graves in some way. And what you might expect to
find is that the burials with more grave, with more grave goods, and with more
stuff in them, might be found in the more elaborate houses and houses with more
burials. But we just don't find that, you see, there's no trend in this graph. We're
not getting, we're not getting some of the relationship from the bottom
here up to the top there, where you get more, you know, richer graves in the
more elaborate burial buildings. So again this is another indication that the houses that were in some sense in control of burial and ritual, we're
not able to translate that type of status into richness, control of trade,
control of production, control of storage and so on. So it's a type of society
which I would call egalitarian, but within which the word differences based
on sort of social and ideological considerations. So that still leaves us
not really understanding how this very complex, dense set of houses, this dense
population, was organized. How was the daily practices of the
economy and so on, and food and production, how was all that organized?
And so I'm going to try and look into that now. And one way of doing that is to
look at the artifacts that are found in each of these houses, bearing in mind the
problems they raised earlier about which of these are really contemporary
and the changes within the life of any particular house. And so someone who's
tried to understand the arrangement of the social arrangement of the
settlement using the artifacts and architectural features inside the houses
is Camilla Mazzucato. And what she has done is code every house in terms of the
types of artifacts and material culture and architectural arrangement and the
paintings and the Bulls heads and so on in each house. And she's then drawn lines,
if you like, between the houses that are most similar in terms of the things that
you have found in them. And then she uses a type of analysis and a network
analysis in order to see if there are any groupings. And so what's on
this diagram the circles here are the houses and these squares are the
artifacts that tell you why two houses are put close to each other. So if you've
got two houses that are close to each other here, that's because they're very
similar in terms of material culture. It's not because they're close to
each other on the site, it's just they're similar to each other in terms of them,
the stuff in them. And you can't see it, but I can see that all
of these houses up here, these are all in the southern part of our excavations in
that southern area, whereas all of these houses here are in the northern part of
our northern excavation area. So remember that she's not putting
any spatial information in here; it's simply that the artifacts have grouped
the, group the houses into two groups, which correlate with our two excavation
areas. That suggests that at Çatalhöyük there may be two societies, that the
northern Mound and the southern land doing different things, part of one site,
divided in some way into two subgroups. But it becomes yet more interesting if
you use the same technique to look more closely. So that this is looking
here at the southern area, the south excavations, and this is at the
northern area that we were looking at before. And on these graphs again it's
the same thing: that the, how close and how linked these houses are is a measure
of the similarity in terms of the architecture and internal features and
artifacts in these houses. And so if we look here, what you see is that there are
four buildings here close to each other, 76, 79, 80, and 89, those four here. If
you look at where they are on the graph they're here 79, 89, 80, and 76, so again
she didn't put in any spatial information, but it, what this is showing
very clearly is that there's a little group of houses down here closer to each
other. So there's a little neighborhood of closely similar houses. And we find
the same up here, that there is little neighborhoods of houses that are simply
clustered together in these diagrams. That suggests that Çatalhöyük is
organized into a set of local neighborhoods, little clusters or groups
of houses, that are somehow doing similar things together, that are somehow
more closely related. But in addition to that there's something else going on,
because you have odd houses like this one, 96 here, which is over here and is
more closely related to these buildings over here. So as well as these little
neighborhoods there are also these offshoots, these strains for the
connections, that I'm going to try and make sense of that. One of
the ways that we've used the work that Kevin Kay has been doing is to look at the
way that the particular buildings change through time, and we saw this sort of
thing before, but this is a simplified version. So if we take this building, 77
for example, this is looking at through through time, through the sequence of use
of that particular house, looking at the number of hearths there are and the number of ovens. And so through that sequence there are a good number of hearths and
ovens. But you see this other building here, building 59, has a whole period in
which there are no hearths and ovens. And that occurs in a number of other cases
where you've got gaps in either hearths or ovens or in both. So there must have
been a way in which this house was somehow producing food during the years.
And these gaps in the lack of hearths in houses is suggesting that
people are collaborating in some way so that people are cooking in one house and
sharing food amongst other. And this type of evidence was
also found in the archaeo-botanical evidence, which is suggesting that there
are local clusters in terms of consumption of particular types of food, but also in the production of food. But so there seems to be evidence from weed
seeds and other types of marker that groups of houses, local neighborhood
groups of houses, are producing food from similar fields or adjacent fields in a
landscape and then bringing it back and consuming that food within these
same sorts of clusters. One way we can see that is
through using isotopes and we're looking here at the isotopes of the people
buried within buildings. So I mentioned to you that you can have up to 60, 62
people buried within a house, most houses have much less in, but we nevertheless
think that people are being buried into these houses from other houses. And if we
look at the diets of the people buried in these houses, we find that they're
clustered. So you can see here that if you look at the diets in this
building, they're rather different from the diets in that building and so on and
so forth. And if you, we've done statistical tests on this, and this is a
significant, these are significant differences statistically. So
this is suggesting that the people who who bury, who were buried in a house, also
ate together. So there is some sort of community of groups of people who both
buried together and ate together. And if we expand that out to look at groups of,
neighborhood groups, of houses, we find the same thing again: statistical
evidence that the diets of clusters of houses are similar in some sense. So what
we can begin to say is that there are neighborhood groupings within Çatalhöyük and that your membership of a neighborhood group was important in
terms of the way that you built your house, what you put in your house, in
terms of how you produce food, and how you consumed food, and how you buried
people. But I also mentioned those strange cases where you have
long-distance connections across the site. They don't seem to be neighborhood-
based. And so this is an example of a house
in Çatalhöyük. Here you have the northern wall and here's the southern
wall with an oven and a half here in front of it. So you would come
down a ladder onto this little platform here, rather like going down the chimney
in a Father Christmas sort of way You come down the ladder here onto this
platform and then you move northwards onto these white platforms, where people
are buried. There was some burning here when this place was abandoned. But
on this wall here above this platform, we found this painting which ended up
looking like this. And you can see that it's got a series of vertical panels or
vertical lines and attached to those are these triangles, and in between the
triangles through this there is this brick pattern. So you can then say, well,
are there any other paintings like that at Çatalhöyük? And there are. So you can
see up—so this is the one we just looked at. Up here, you say this, see this very
similar these vertical lines, the triangles, and the brick pattern. So it's
very unlikely that these two people weren't aware of each other, these
two buildings weren't aware of each other, but they're not next door to each
other. They're in fact as far away as you can get in the southern area. So this is
the one, this one here, and there's this one over here. So this
is suggesting long-term, I mean long-distance, connections that
cut across the little neighborhood groupings. And if we look at a whole
series of things at Çatalhöyük that are very famous, like the pairs of
leopards which is a very distinctive Çatalhöyük
symbolism, or these figures with upraised arms that we think of bears, or
these benches with horns. If you plot where they are, you find that they're
not clustered, they're not, they don't fit into any of the neighborhood
groupings, they just spread out across the whole site. And it's very tempting to
sort of interpret these in terms of some sort of societies or sodality that
cut across the neighborhoods. And so these might be societies like medicine
societies or hunting societies or some sort of sodality, that links
people together across the whole settlement. So there's two types of
things at Çatalhöyük: there are these local neighborhoods that are
nested in each other, very small ones into larger ones into the north-south
division and into the whole settlement, these nested little entities, and then
cross-cutting that there are these large-scale connections. And burial is a
very interesting thing because it seems to somehow link these two things
together. So what I've tried to do here is show that some houses, like this one
here with a big circle, have lots of burials in. In this one here has lots of
burials in, it's a bit fewer, but there are other houses with no burials in. So
this is the idea that people are buried into these houses from somewhere else. So we don't know where they were buried into from. We can't say where they came
from, but it's likely, seems likely to me, that the most, this type of
burial into these history houses that was on a local scale that was probably,
given the dietary evidence and so on, it seems likely that these people
buried in the houses were a local, part of the local group. But
there's something else going on with the burials, which is that there's lots of
evidence of secondary removal. So you see here a torso with the arms and legs
missing. And here there are examples where you've got the torso and the head
missing. And here there's another body laid out here with the head missing. Here's some more examples. So we find
quite a number of cases where, after the burial has occurred, the parts of the
body are taken and to be kept and handed around for quite some period of
time. And so one example, it's quite telling, is in this case here where you
got a woman who is buried with her skull that she's clasping another
woman she's clasping the other woman's head on towards her. And this face has
been plastered so the facial features have been plastered back
on to the skull and repainted. But they've been repainted four
times. So that suggests that just for some degree this skull has been
passed around. And there's lots of other examples of painted skulls and so on.
But so it seems possible that skulls and other body parts were circulated within the site. We of course don't know really. We can't put the
skulls— it would be ideal if we could put the
skulls back onto the bodies—and we haven't been able to do that. So we don't
really know where the skulls came from. So it's possible they're still within
these local neighborhoods, but it's also possible that they are
circulated within the community more widely, creating these larger connections.
Just to make it yet more complicated, we've been trying to work on
the genetic affiliations of the people who were buried inside the houses. And one of the problems at Çatalhöyük is
that the bone is preserved really quite badly and so it's been very, very
difficult to get out ancient DNA. But we have been using teeth, and the very
detailed measurements of human teeth, as a proxy for genetic affiliation. So there
is some evidence that the very detailed morphology of your teeth is
genetic, is partly genetically controlled, so that you can use teeth as a sort of
proxy measure of genetic distance. And so what's happened here is that Marin Pilloud and Clark Larsen have been taking bodies from these houses and looking at
their similarity in terms of their, this genetic proxy. And what they find is that
that it's not the case that people buried in the same house are more
genetically closely linked than other people in the community. In fact there's
a total mixing so that very similar people in terms of their genetics are
found in widely different houses buried in widely different houses across the
settlement. We do have a new project that is working on ancient DNA in
order to look at this directly in the ancient DNA. And the first
evidence from that supports this idea. The first evidence from the ancient DNA
supports the fact that people buried in a house are not closely
genetically linked. So how do we explain this? And Pilloud and Larsen argue that
what's going on here is that after, some time after birth, children are farmed out
through adoption or fostering or some sort of process. So that children grow up
not with their genetic parents, but with adoptive parents. So
that the society is one in which children have two types of parents: you
have your genetic parents and your adoptive parents. So it all becomes
extremely mixed, so that you may not even know who your relations are because it
all becomes one great family of everybody very tightly linked up.
But it shows again that the society of Çatalhöyük was very, very
tightly networked and meshed in the various ways I've been describing. So
that if you looked at Çatalhöyük at the time, one of these time slices, you
would see all these houses apparently all sort of clustered together.
But underlying that there are these very complex social relationships, which are
creating a very tightly knit society. One in which there are these nested patterns
of affiliation and these cross-cutting lines of various sorts that link people
together in a very tight framework. I'm not going to, I want to sort of skip over
this because time's moving on. But what one other thing to say is that
there is a lot of evidence that older people had a particular status at
Çatalhöyük. These types of images from Çatalhöyük we are
reinterpreting as people, women who were post-childbirth who are sort of
aged. And that there is lots of evidence, from the dietary evidence as well, that
people of some age, both men and women, were treated with some special
privileges. And so it seems to me that another aspect of the society of Çatalhöyük was that the rules and constraints and orderliness of the
society were somehow in the hands of elders who had a [missing sound] society.
Again I want to sort of rush over this, I think, because some time is running on.
But I just want to emphasize that there are a lot of ways in which the
society at Çatalhöyük went through changes and in the internal organization
of the site and in terms of the types of burial that were going on—the burial
associations. This is showing the domestication of cattle through time,
the gradual domestication of cattle, the gradual transformation, and the
agricultural system, the gradual environmental change from wetter to
drier. So there's a whole series of things that happen through time at
Çatalhöyük. And that many of the things I'm talking about
do actually change towards the end of the occupation. I've mainly been talking
about the middle sort of period. But right towards the end of the site, there
is some real evidence of something different going on. That is the emergence
of very large houses with large amounts of storage and with possible
specialization of production support that, right at the end, something else
happens although it quickly dies out by the time of the West Mound. So there isn't a moment where things change. And one can try to talk about this as a
process where, in the early middle period, there's a set of processes that occur in
this tightly knit, very highly dense community that lead, but
nevertheless leads to pressure and stress. There's evidence of disease and
stress on the human bodies. And that creates some sort of crisis around 6,500
BC that is then relieved in the late occupation by having a society
which is more mobile and more dispersed and more emphasizing production rather
than ritual. So I just want again to thank the team and to the
various people that have supported and funded us, some of them over 25
years, which is very impressive, and to thank you for listening. Thank you. We do have some time for some questions.
Does anyone have any questions? That was a wonderful presentation, thank you. I had
the opportunity of visiting Çatalhöyük myself a number of years ago and was
very impressed by what I saw there. So thank you for your supervising all of
this. Several thousand years later and not that far north is the Hittite Empire,
which is Indo-European and in language. Do you think this could have been a
proto-Indo-European settlement? Yes so am I still working? Could you hear me in the
back still yes? So yes, so Colin Renfrew, who's talked a lot about the spread of
Indo-European languages into Europe, he argues that these were
proto-Indo-European speakers and there have been a number of other people who
followed up with that. And it's partly related to the work
on the spread of humans as indicated by ancient DNA. And so of course ancient
DNA doesn't tell us what language people were speaking. But there's
now strong evidence that the spread of farming through Çatalhöyük and on into
Europe involved a significant migration and movement of people. And so
some people argue that we could talk about those as Indo-Europeans, but
nevertheless are a number of linguists who protest this and who argue that
in fact Indo-European languages spread through Europe later on. And there is
other types of genetic evidence of a link to that. So it's an open question. I
would say the predominant view now is that the Indo-European languages spread
through Europe later than Çatalhöyük. So we don't know what language they
would have spoken. Yeah. Hi. I just wanted to clarify the abandoned houses you were
talking about earlier in those mountains. Where are you speaking? I can't see you.
Okay, sorry, okay. The abandoned houses you're talking about, do you mean to say
that they are standing structures that are simply empty and not in use or have
they sort of tumbled down creating much more of the open space
that maybe people were looking for? Yeah. I mean bear in mind that we're talking
about really short time periods. These are 25 years or so. But yes, we do have a lot
of evidence that they're vacant lots. So they're not turned into refuse areas and
they're not lived in but they, but what we see is plaster falling off the
wall, or wall or walls leaning, or rat infestations of mice or a mice
infestation or being used as, you know, as a latrine. So that's what I meant.
But if this is new, I didn't realize this until very recently, it's only the dating
that has really, because you can't, you know— the dating, the archaeology just shows
that something is after the other. It doesn't show you the gaps. And so it's
only this dating that's proved, shown, that there really are these gaps and that we
sort of, they abandoned a lot, the vacant lot is actually a really
important part of the settlement pattern. Hello, could you tell me how . . . Could you identify yourself again? What? Where you are? There, okay. Thank you. Suzanne Morgan. How was this site selected to research it? It was found by James Melaart in the 50s. And
he, do you mean why did he excavate it? He excavated it because he
wanted to prove that early farming societies occurred in Anatolia and
not only in the Fertile Crescent. So that was his aim. But he also
saw immediately that it was a very special site, because he found paintings
and things almost immediately. So he knew he was onto a good thing. And so
that's why he excavated it. The site was then abandoned for about thirty
years after he stopped excavating. And the reason I excavated it was because I
also knew it was a very amazing site. And it would allow me to explore questions that
you can't do at most sites, because the preservation here is really remarkable.
Those very fine layers and it's mind boggingly complex. And so I just wanted to see what
we could do. Two quick questions. Thank you. Do we have evidence that this
settlement was part of a larger community, if not a proto-kingdom, at
least some kind of a broader society? And second, did you have a chance to do
an analysis of isotopes in the tooth enamel to determine that
the people buried on that site were born and raised right near there or possibly
came in from other areas? Yeah, so as far as what happened, what happens, in the
area around Çatalhöyük, there have been surveys done and the
initial surveys that were done by Douglas Baird argue that when Çatalhöyük
formed, the landscape emptied. So everybody came into Çatalhöyük. So
it sort of acted as a magnet—and just drew everybody, pulled everybody in. So there
are sites in the landscape before Çatalhöyük and there are sites in the
landscape after Çatalhöyük. By the time of Çatalhöyük
everything gets sucked in. So that was the argument. Whether that's true or not
we'll have to see as new work gets done, but that was the original claim. And
on the isotope work it's, that's really interesting, because we assumed
that people were traveling all over the place and, you know, coming in from a wide
variety of origins. But the vast number of people at Çatalhöyük were born and
raised on the plain all the way through the sequence.
It's not the case that people were marrying in from lots of other, or moving
in from wider areas. There's a small percentage, less than 5%. I just want to get
your thoughts on the recent neolithic site in Israel and if you think there
may be a relationship between that site and the one here at in Turkey.
So which site are you talking about in Israel? I'm not sure what it's called.
It's a very large neolithic settlement. They say it's one of the biggest ones
they've ever found in the Levant. Yes, so there are, there a large number of sites
in the Levant of the same time period or earlier than Çatalhöyük.
And there are lots of similarities in terms of material culture, you know. A lot
a lot of the obsidian points, for example, show connections and we know that
obsidian was traded over huge distances across the Middle East in the
Neolithic period. So there were definitely connections, but I doubt
that much of it was direct. I think it was sort of indirect, down the line,
exchange. So first of all, thank you for a fantastic lecture. You describe what
seems sort of like a latticework of identity group formation, where in
certain respects, depending on what variable you're analyzing, group
affiliation might be determined very clustered spatially depending on diet,
for example, and yet there would be, at the same time, cutting across that group,
affiliations and other variables like the decorations and so on. I guess I'm
curious if you think that that lattice- like nature of group identity formation
is unique to Çatalhöyük, or is this a common sort of feature of human behavior
that you've been able to identify at Çatalhöyük because of the fine-grained
analyses and multidisciplinary methodological techniques that you
employed there. Yeah, I mean the difficulty is that to
find, you know, to find evidence from other sites that would allow us to make
those parallels. And until other sites have done this type of fine-grained
analysis, it's going to be very difficult to see, certainly ethnographically, you
know. So, for example, there are societies ethnographically where children are
fostered out and don't live with their nuclear family. So that does, you know, so I can show you. And I have used a lot, you know, ethnographic examples
from around the world that show parallels with it. And so yes, I
mean there are lots of, you know for example, people make parallels with the
pueblos, the Southwest Pueblos, particularly in terms of various sorts
of sodalities, the cross cutting sodalities. And there are many societies which have
some sort of nested lineage system, you know, through time. So I think it fits in
in an ethnographic sense, but I think it's very different from what we
expected. Thank you very much. Looking at the
skeletons and having analyzed them what can we say
about their general health, life expectancy and of course is there
any dietary advice we can derive from those people? Thank you. So there's been a huge amount of work down on the human remains and trying to answer those sorts
of questions. I've been surprised to find that there are a good number of people who got to a good old age. I mean it's difficult to age old people on the bones, but
they seem to be living up to 67, some people living up to 60, 70. But there's very high infant, child mortality, we have lots, and we have lots
and lots of infants and neonates, people dying off very early. But if you manage
to get to say 10, these were relatively healthy.
With agricultural societies, health tends to decline, because people are
eating a much narrower diet, you know, carbohydrate-based diet. And so they tend,
you know, illnesses and other sorts of things tend to develop through time. But
at Çatalhöyük that we just have a moment between being healthy
hunter-gatherers and really ill farmers. Where we're a little, where we're a
little bit in between and they're they're still relatively healthy because
they're not fully—they're still eating a lot of wild, a very diverse, you know,
mosaic of diets and things. So that's that's the answer. Eat a diverse mosaic of diets, yeah. Well, thank you all for joining us both in person and online this
evening. Can we show appreciation one more time for our wonderful speaker today? And please join us for a really nice
reception in the Mesopotamian gallery. Thank you again. [unintelligle remarks]
