Debate
JOINT DISCUSSION 
Eleni ASOUTI, Andrew FAIRBAIRN, Louise MARTIN, Nerissa RUSSEL, Denise CARRUTHERS
e.asouti@ucl.ac.uk / andrew.fairbairn@anu.edu.au / louise.martin@ucl.ac.uk / nr29@cornell.edu / denise@permedia.ca
Catherine Kuzucuoglu: Just a small question. Was there at the beginning of the Holocene wild wheat in Central Anatolia?
Eleni Asouti: The whole area is within the distribution of the so-called wild progenitors. But so was southeast Anatolia and so was the northern Levant. I mean, trying to trace the beginnings of agriculture by simply relying on the distributions of wild progenitors is not a very safe approach. For example, recent studies on the genetics of the origins of the first domesticated crops have suggested that the major cereal domesticates, the so-called founder crops, were brought under cultivation once at a specific fixed point, and could not have been brought under cultivation at different time points in different locations. And then you see the same varieties that cannot be genetically related to another wild progenitor spreading elsewhere. Çatalhöyük has minimal quantities of wild cereals, and these are not related to the domesticated varieties that we find.
Catherine Kuzucuoglu: Yes, but my question is that we see wild cereals and not wild wheat in your statistics and data.
Eleni Asouti: These were not species abundance values. They were presence values for different plant groups (such as cereals for example). We believe that abundance values in general may be subject to all sorts of taphonomic accidents (in terms of wild wheat species there has been identified Triticum boeoticum from charred assemblages believed to represent burnt dung remains)
Catherine Kuzucuoglu: OK, now I come to the thing that is puzzling me if I can explain it. The site of Çatal has lasted quite a long time in flooding conditions. Except at the beginning. When the Çatalhöyük people came they settled, as you said, on land that was not cultivable, and they exploited land that was far away. But let’s say that 500 years later there was a change. Still, 10km away cultivable grounds still existed. But now they had also territories that had been constructed by the alluvial fan. This alluvial also represented resource of land. At the same time, this flooding, whether it happened regularly or irregularly, meant some difference for the settling and living conditions. But they did not leave, they stayed there. And maybe they changed, and developed a greater variety of subsistence strategies related to agriculture and exploiting this new agricultural land that was developing around the site. Or they just continued the same pattern as they knew at the beginning, to go out to the drier places for their crops.
Eleni Asouti: On the basis of the archaeobotanical data we don’t see any real changes, but that may just be a reflection of the fact that they continued exploiting and cultivating the same crops with the same techniques, irrespective of the area. Now, the fuel evidence seems to suggest that as time went by they were exploiting more diverse, dispersed and possibly more distant places as well. If we think that, based on almost all ethnographic case studies, fuel collection really is not a task on its own in any sedentary agrarian society, then that might be an indication that at the same time they were cultivating areas further away. The fact that the crop assemblage stays as it is, does not mean that they could not diversify the production. But on the basis of the archaeobotanical record we cannot really say that this actually did take place. Neil Roberts’ data basically seem to suggest that this alluvial backswamp clay is there through the main part of the Neolithic occupation, and we start seeing buried soil horizons towards the end of it, and right before the beginning of the West mound occupation (Chalcolithic). So, I think we should wait and see the fully published results of these investigations before we can actually say that there were different surfaces created at a later date.
Louise Martin: We don’t know the extent of the settlement in the earliest levels of Çatal – it could be relatively small. And therefore it may not require very large areas to grow for cultivation. There are some sand ridges about 5km away, which we’re trying to model at the moment as to how much area you would need to support certain amounts of people. But the question is still valid that the location is clearly not prime for doing cereal agriculture from the start. So why people came there originally maybe has to have other explanations.
Catherine Kuzucuoglu: Another point is that I am very disturbed not to see birds in your alimentation statistics. Because when you know the Konya Plain, when you imagine it with a little bit more water, birds are really important.
Louise Martin: The plots that I showed were actually only of those selected taxa which make up the real majority at the site. About 80–90 % of the fauna is represented by those large mammal species, and therefore there were no birds shown on the graphs. Actually there are birds at Çatalhöyük, but they are surprisingly few, considering that it must have been a great location for birds. Nerissa Russell and Kevin McGowan are studying the bird bones at Cornell University, and find a predominance of waterbirds, as you would expect, wetland birds, lots of ducks, lots of migrants, and so forth. So they are there, but in all contexts they are in a much lower representation than you might expect, given the location.
Catherine Kuzucuoglu: Does this mean that there was not a lot of hunting?
Louise Martin: In my view, yes. It confirms that they are really primarily reliant on domestic herds. They are obviously hunting other large mammals – cattle and equids, boar and deer. They also appear to be eating birds’ eggs quite frequently which would have been a collected resource. But my point is that people at Çatalhöyük do not seem to have been hunting a lot of birds, which we assume were readily available at certain times of year. Hunting of mammals is clearly taking place and may have been fairly important, but it is not the dominant mode of obtaining meat.
Wendy Matthews: From Level VIII on the mound of Çatalhöyük there is a major change in the bricks. If you think of the bulk of the mound, this is about 5 to 9 metres. And these are oxidised sediments – some of them are definitely alluvial –, but others are more brown oxidised sediments and may be from raised or dry areas. So this may be a change in the deposition in the region. But in bringing soils onto site for mud bricks, we have to think about who has access to those lands as well. And they vary almost from house to house. And related to that, palaeoecological coring has been either linked to specific mounds with Douglas’s survey, or the very edge of the Çatalhöyük mound. So on the fan there may be a whole range of variation which hasn’t been picked up by systematic coring. So we don’t really understand the mosaic of the alluvial fan, and how that might change through time, with implications for cereals. And if I may just switch slightly to dung, I took a range of micromorphological samples from Asikli Höyük all coming from the earliest levels of the open area. And most of the fuel was in fact dung burnt as fuel. There is also a vestigial layer there of trampled, uncharred dung which may indicate penning within the settlement. So, one of the ways perhaps of looking at animal management before morphological change in the bones may involve, as you said, herding techniques or penning; and certainly the proliferation of the dung as fuel at Asikli suggests a very close relationship with this questionable penning area. Brochier at Cafer Höyük and Çayönü also picked up dung. But dung is taphonomically difficult to detect, either because it is uncharred in an animal pen, or if it is burnt the occluded carbon gets burnt off quickly after 300–400°, so you won’t pick it up as charred plant materials. In other words, micromorphology would help in that respect. As to animal pens, in fact I found two within the settlement at Çatalhöyük, somewhere in the deep sounding area, and they are larger than depicted on the reconstruction. But from that you identified neonates and young animals. Simultaneously, you cited that Pinarbasi A was in fact perhaps seasonal because of the young animals. We have them also within the mound at Çatalhöyük. So I wonder if there is additional evidence to suggest seasonality, not just these young animals which may be even penning at an early stage in Pinarbasi.
Douglas Baird: I think this flooding question still needs significant investigation and discussion, particularly in terms of the human scales that we’re talking about. I’ll go further than Wendy and say not only is there a problem about the number of core samples and the fact that they are related to archaeological sites, but indeed those samples show there is significant micro-topographical variation on the fan during these early phases of alluviation; and really we could be looking at quite a mosaic of landscapes within this flooded environment. And therefore we may not have to look as far away as 10km for areas for farming, in addition to which we need to consider possibilities – obviously very difficult to demonstrate – of land management. People have been farming in the flooded environments of the Konya Plain for millennia successfully, using all sorts of drainage and other related activities. Drainage is the question as much as irrigation. So, there are lots of issues I think still to be investigated.
Eleni Asouti: So far we haven’t had any evidence for the existence of drainage works around Çatal. The other main point when saying that this is a non-optimal area is precisely its unpredictability, which of course also means that one should definitely not deny the existence of such micro-topographical variability and of mosaics of environments. But the question arises as to why adopt highly opportunistic farming, possibly carrying large risks in terms of crop failure that could have occurred at any point in the event of a flood, and not decide to place the settlement 10km further up in the first place and do away with all these risk-carrying factors. This is not an exclusive argument; it just tries to see the whole thing as it develops in the perspective of an optimal farming strategy. An optimal farming strategy would suggest that these people should avoid the alluvial floodplain itself if they were completely ‘agriculturally-minded’, and found the settlement in the hills and the terraces 10km away altogether.
Douglas Baird: Whether the areas 10km away were any more optimal in these low rainfall areas, poor hill soils and so forth – these aren’t good soils 10km away – for the moment remain big questions.
Eleni Asouti: But they are still next to the river, which is basically the pattern we see in Asikli and Canhasan III.
Douglas Baird: Depends on how deep-cut the river was. In terms of the drainage channels and so on, we have millennia of human occupation on the fan and we don’t have a drainage or an irrigation channel to show for it before 1900.
Didier Binder: As far as I know the wheat assemblage of Asikli seems to be very evolved. To compare it to similar situations in the East – did you find close relations with assemblages of wheat further to the east?
Eleni Asouti: Well, I can tell you that domesticated wheats exist in Çayönü from early on; wheats were definitely introduced, because for these particular varieties the wild progenitors do not exist in the area. So, yes, I think certainly wheat cultivation could have been introduced in Central Anatolia via the southeast too. And in any case, Asikli is much earlier than Çatal. So even if we decide to accommodate the possibility of a different pathway for domesticated plants and animals arriving in Çatal, the truth remains that we see as the main route for the Early Neolithic agriculture of Central Anatolia the southeast.
Didier Binder: Louise, can you tell us if there are differences between the three layers of Pinarbasi A? Do you have differences between the animal assemblages?
Louise Martin: Denise Carruthers is studying this, but my impression is that they are fairly similar. But we are really talking such small sample sizes of faunal remains for Pinarbasi A that I am sure sample size would be interfering with any patterning anyway.
Peter Kuniholm: When we talk about the distribution of botanicals it’s instructive to look at the quail migration, which goes from the Black Sea all the way down to the Sinai; and when you see the distribution of emmer, einkorn and barley, then that’s exactly where the quail go. Whether the quail go there because that’s where the stuff was, or because you have fifteen, twenty, thirty billion quail pooping on you land, and you’re going to have a crop before you know it –. But it has nothing to do with people whatever.
Adnan Baysal: From your data, Louise, it seems that the amount of sheep and goat from Pinarbasi towards Asikli and Çatalhöyük shows a little decrease, while cattle show an increase.
Louise Martin: It is true that Çatalhöyük does show more cattle – in some phases it’s up to 20 %, but not the 90 % that Dexter Perkins identified. In my view, this has to do with the ecological difference between Çatal and Asikli; if you have most likely more cattle available around Çatalhöyük – the receding seasonal floods and the marshes and so forth make really good cattle territory. In Asikli you actually have better sheep territory – less standing water and marshy areas, although I don’t know the environmental reconstructions for that area particularly well. Cattle was obviously extremely important to the people of Çatalhöyük and it could very much be a factor which drew people to that area, as opposed to these prime cereal growing soils. It would be wonderful for wild animals. So in my view the differences between the sites are probably down to availability or ecological variation.
Hijlke Buitenhuis: First of all we are very happy with the Pinarbasi data – we finally have what seems to be a reflection of the natural fauna in this area, of the hunted fauna. What is clear from the Asikli material is that, if it is a managed wild population, it’s a very limited population. Although there are quite a lot of species found, 75–85 % of the material is sheep and goat. And that goes for the whole site. They must have invested a lot of time and energy in managing these wild animals and they didn’t have time to do actually much else. Actually, in Çatal, immediately when we see the real domesticated sheep, the real herding coming up, the amount of hunted animals, apart from these last groups, is larger. So there is this dichotomy between hunting and management. It’s an interesting thing to see that for Asikli it’s very difficult to speak about hunting there. Actually there is no real hunting – by far the majority is this wild resource management, whatever that may be and however they did it. In relation to Clemens’ talk earlier today about the dispersal of the Neolithic cultures, or the Neolithic developments, it was very interesting to see your data on cattle. The conclusion was that in Çatal there are no domestic cattle – or maybe only at the very end. But they don’t seem to change very much. The evidence is 100 % clear that by the time we have this dispersal to Northwestern and Western Anatolia, even into Greece, they have domestic cattle. This morning we heard that there are real connections between Central Anatolia and Western Anatolia and between Central Anatolia and Northwest Anatolia, and they arrived there, at least on the basis of the evidence from Ilipinar, with the full complement of domestic animals. So where did these people get their domestic cattle from?
Louise Martin: First, about your first point, why do you get more wild animals at Çatal than at Asikli? – It doesn’t initially seem to make sense but there are a number of factors, I suppose. One is that there may have been an absence in the sheep and goat at Çatal for particular times of the year if flocks were really being pastured at a distance and then returned to site on some form of seasonal basis. We haven’t done our seasonality studies on the sheep remains yet to know whether this is the case, but if it is, it may be that wild animals were hunted at times when domesticates were absent, or few. So, there are all sorts of factors that might be adding to the pattern, as well as the variations in the availability of animals mentioned above. Also, I think there might be slightly more equids in the dryer Konya Plain than there were in Cappadocia. There would be extensive grasslands coming up every summer in the Konya area and I can imagine them being prime for wild grazers. In the middle period of Çatal there are actually quite a lot of equids – more than we expected. Concerning your second point about the lack of domestic cattle at Çatalhöyük, it is worth remembering that the new project hasn’t yet analysed the upper layers, and this picture is therefore missing. Therefore we don’t really know what’s happening to cattle at the top, or the end of the sequence (e.g. Levels I–IV). Our colleague Sheelagh Frame is looking at the fauna from Çatal West. We are really interested to see what happens there, and maybe there are changes. But maybe it’s not until people actually started moving animals from their prime environment that they start to change size. And therefore, things could be going on in Çatal which we are not detecting, and it’s not until they are actually moved off that they morphologically change.
Hijlke Buitenhuis: Actually, for this hunting on the equids, which increases, in the Tepecik-Çiftlik area (which is rather fertile and not very dry) 25 % of the remains which I looked at this year were either equids or deer, so they are there quite a lot. And it seems to be a pattern for this (Early Chalcolithic) period – they have quite a lot of hunted, real hunted wild animals.
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