Conclusion
CONCLUDING REMARKS AND OUTLOOK 
Damien BISCHOFF, Frédéric GERARD & Laurens THISSEN
IFEA, Nuru Ziya Sok n° 22, PK 54, 80072 Beyoglu, Istanbul, TR. EHESS, Toulouse, FR. /
IFEA, Nuru Ziya Sok n° 22, PK 54, 80072 Beyoglu, Istanbul, TR. CNRS-UMR 7041 ArScAn, Maison de l'Archéologie et de l'Ethnologie, Nanterre, FR. / Independent researcher, Amsterdam, NL.
damienbischoff@hotmail.com / frederic.gerard@isbank.net.tr
Damien Bischoff: 'Roger, you know what I mean?'
Roger Matthews: 'Yes, Damien, I see what you mean!'
(from a discussion)
Rather perfectly summing up the two days of the CANeW Table Ronde, we would like to quote verbatim the few words spoken by Roger Matthews and by one of the undersigned at the conclusion of the meeting:
'Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of CANeW I want to thank you really from the bottom of my heart very much for listening so long and so attentively. It was a long day, I think almost 12 hours, it's late, and I will keep it short, and Roger will keep it short too. I want to stress the good spirit of the occasion, and everybody has witnessed the growing debate over the two days. After a hesitant beginning where everybody needed to settle, I will remember especially this day as a very intense one. Part of the positive mood was definitely a shared willingness not to take refuge constantly in the adage that because of lack of sufficient data we cannot really make statements. This is in fact a negative approach. By the very fact that the conference took place and also that we did actually run out of time, this negative approach was challenged and duly dismissed. Another positive thing that I want to emphasise is the attentive, though silent presence of many young Turkish students in archaeology, for whom the Table Ronde was, as I heard yesterday, a truly original experience as compared to the symposia they are used to. So, in many ways, the positive spirit as well as the format of the conference - I mean its openness, its mix of students, PhD students and professors, of young and older people, further the stress on dialogue, on a contrasting and exchanging of ideas, on a pooling of knowledge and expertise - were all quite successful, and, I may add, fully in line with the aims of the CANeW Workshop. Peter Kuniholm yesterday expressed an elementary aim at the end of the day: the conference, he said, goes for the big lines, for the big questions - and this was perhaps most beautifully and honestly expressed by Damien's lecture.'
Laurens Thissen
'Well I'm fully aware I have ninety or so thirsty throats and hungry stomachs in front of me, so I'm going to be very brief. I expect you know the story of the man who goes out one evening with his wife, and perhaps has a drink or two, and then comes back when it is very dark, to go into his house and he drops his key somewhere on the pavement, and it is completely dark. He looks around for a moment and then moves ten meters away where there is a streetlight shining down, and starts looking. And his wife says: 'What are you doing looking over there, it's nowhere near where you dropped your key'. And he says: 'Yes, but this is the only place where I can see'. And I have felt a sense of this through these past two days, that in the Neolithic of Central Anatolia, we have streetlight shining partially on Çatalhöyük, on Asikli Höyük and in various other places, but much of the street is actually still very dark and mysterious. And this sort of a duality of feeling I guess has gone through the two days. I have been very impressed by the multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, multi-stranded and integrated approaches that people have taken to the Neolithic of Central Anatolia, including geomorphology, settlement systems and structure, subsistence, technology, ideology and so on, both in terms of Central Anatolia as a unit in its own right, and Central Anatolia as it fits into the much wider picture. On the other hand, of course we do have so much still to learn, there still are so many dark places along the street, and there still is a need for so much more dedicated specific work on the Neolithic of Central Anatolia. And it's very encouraging that this work is actually taking place. I was extremely taken by the few words Eliot Braun mentioned on the sorts of densities and intensity of settlement that might occur even in quite regional areas with hundreds of settlements. I don't necessarily think that is going to end up as being the picture in Central Anatolia, but nevertheless we might expect one day a quite dramatically different picture to emerge.
'I think this conference has been a real turning point, and a consolidation point, really, in the history of the discipline, short as it is so far. It has been an opportunity to define research issues, but also to define the nature of the evidence - both the evidence that exists and the evidence that might come to exist in the future. And of course those two aspects go hand in hand: research issues develop as evidence develops, and the one generates the other to some extent. Border zones are always very exciting areas, because things change in border zones, whether those borders are chronological or geographic or whatever. And we can see in Central Anatolia that the whole complex of social, economic, ideological issues are played out, acted out, worked out in a whole range of quite complex ways, not in a homogeneous way at all. And this is typical of a border region really. The Neolithic doesn't come to Central Anatolia as a complete package, as it perhaps seems to do in other parts of the Mediterranean and beyond. And this I think is the great significance of Central Anatolia for our studies.'
Roger Matthews
Outlook
The CANeW Project involved an innovative archaeological Table Ronde oriented along several specific benchmarks. The scope was regional; there was a large time frame allowing us to deal with long-term processes; topics were general, goals aimed to be synthetic; there was a solid preparation for the Table Ronde through an e-mail discussion-list, there was, and continues to be, a web site, and there are specially commissioned databases and maps serving as working tools. We tried to give credit to the real purpose of a workshop/Table Ronde by dedicating the major part of the time at our disposal to discussions, while, simultaneously, reducing the interval between the event itself and its publication as limited as possible, in order to keep the results fresh and the spirit alive.
In the future, similar projects could be organised dealing with other regions, such as Upper Mesopotamia or West Anatolia and the Aegean, that seem to us mature for a similar synthetic approach, even though we have to stress that specific data collection and its subsequent formatting for a web site will imply a longer preparation process.
Having burdened the reader who has reached this stage of the book with perhaps too much serious and heavy talk, we would like to finish with a more light-hearted synopsis and outlook.
The CANeW Project not only demonstrated that it is possible nowadays to organise a symposium,
first of all without a penny till the time of the meeting itself, but with energy, enthusiasm and with the help of internet facilities, so without buying a single post stamp and without making international phone calls;
without asking fees from the participants;
with students and professors acting as equal participants, open minded and freed of hierarchy;
in the country which we are talking about, in this way allowing all the students and scholars of this country to attend and participate;
using a single common language - yes, sorry it is English! Thanks to the British pioneers of the Central Anatolian Neolithic! - to allow everybody to understand and take part in the debates;
and to publish its proceedings within six months of the event (thanks to our dear independent publishing house!);
but also that it is possible
for a group of scholars to move through an online discussion list for six months on pre-selected topics in preparation for a conference (thanks to our friendly colleagues who actively played with us!);
to produce preliminary results, to have people pooling knowledge and listening to the opinions of others (thanks to all people who came to the Table Ronde not only to keep prepared positions and use the opportunity to add her/his paper to a growing bibliography, but to produce a richer viewpoint held on commonly established grounds!);
to include in this preliminary work unpublished data, to publish these online and to update them, in this way enabling access for the scholarly community the world over (thanks to all people who did not cause any diplomatic incident!);
to discuss a real 40 minutes per lecture with an attentive audience.
Moreover, the CANeW Project shows that for such a synthetic work we need
more open minded scholars involved in the discussion list;
more people co-operating to produce original preliminary results;
more data published online to serve Neolithic studies and to allow all students and everybody interested in the Neolithic period to have easy access to the information.
The CANeW Project's organisational team wants to thank all the young and not so young spirits and brains for being enthusiastic in this independent experiment. We encourage you to join us again in the updating of CANeW and in other similar (un-)expected events.