Debate

SYMBOLIC WORLDS OF CENTRAL AND SOUTH-EAST ANATOLIA IN THE NEOLITHIC

Damien BISCHOFF                                                                              
damienbischoff@hotmail.com

Bleda Düring: If I understood matters correctly, you present a kind of model of an Early Neolithic where people were still very much engaged thinking in the world of the Upper Palaeolithic; and then a later Neolithic stage. The point I’d like to raise is that this whole Neolithic period has been such a long process – thousands of years – while, on the other hand, one human life span is so short. Is a person who lives in this period really aware of the fact that he is indeed changing his world, that he is domesticating plants, etc.? Is it an active process, or is it rather something that comes because of the new way of living?

Damien Bischoff: I would say humans are not conscious at all about what happened – I just gave a large-scale picture of the psycho-cultural development. Humans preserve, however, either genetically or spiritually all the previous experiences. The problem with my type of picture is that it tries to go away from the material level. But if you start at the material level, you won’t get the spiritual process. But we have to go up, and what I used is a tool to have a key to understand, and to put myself on the level of, the logic of these people without importing already made models a priori. But there is no consciousness of this process, people have no consciousness of this process at all.

Marcel Otte: Of course it is not the consciousness of the people in prehistory that interests us. It is not our matter. What interests us is what they have been doing. What they have been thinking we don’t know, we will never know, and we don’t even care. What is happening is a historical process, and what is happening in each step of this process nobody knows. But coming back to the shamanist explanation. Of course this is a little logic – as, like you have in China for instance, where all the people coming to the Neolithic are first shamanists, because that’s a kind of religious behaviour which is linked to the hunter-gatherers’ way of life. And that is going to the Neolithic farmers’ life and then they are changing their cosmology or the metaphysics. But the question is, which has been raised by Cauvin already: What was first, was it first in the mind, or was it first in the economic way of life? And Cauvin’s theory was based on exactly the reversed as what you did. He said that first the mind has changed and then the economy and the rest of behaviour followed. But it is a general process not linked to the Near East, it is happening in Central America, it’s happening also in Eastern Asia. Always where people become farmers they change the metaphysic explanation of the world. They have to, otherwise nobody would change, nothing would change. They have to dare, if I may say so, to confront their ideas towards nature, and then to go across the natural laws. It is that they have to dare. So the question is what is first. Do you think they were able to change their way of life before they were daring to change their metaphysics?

Damien Bischoff: I think it’s the wrong way to put the question, because in one way you fall into spiritualism and in another way you fall into materialism. I don’t want to enter in such dialectics. If you see only one term of the question, you will say, OK, it is first spirituality, and after that it is materiality. I only tried to stress the main environmental context. I took Amselle’s culture definition – ‘culture is a moving nebula’. So my picture tried to fit with all the elements, all the data. I consider you will have a constellation of all factors, all data – and we have to have a look at all and not say: humans are like this and environment is like that. I sketched a picture of what might have happened symbolically speaking, staying at the level of the symbolical repertoires. And I tried only to fit and to re-read the archaeological evidence through the prism of symbolism.

Marcel Otte: I completely agree, we have to do that, no doubt. But what you have presented for the eastern part of Anatolia is that you suppose that this was a shamanist initiation ritual. Which is not obvious –

Damien Bischoff: No it’s not obvious, it is just a proposal. If it doesn’t fit with your idea, everybody is up to give another explanation. I mean, I spent two months in Göbekli with Klaus Schmidt’s team, and you can believe me, being there, you have a lot of things coming in your mind, and you say: Why did they go up fifteen kilometres away from Urfa in a very special place, without water? But, instead, our interpretations are based on only limited amounts of square meters excavated. Çatal for instance has only 4 % of the site exposed. The vocabulary gives us a condensed image of the symbolic world. The question is to know how to approach them and how to explain them. Çatalhöyük and Göbekli Tepe are bigger than we are.

Marcel Otte: Every human situation has an explanation, especially a metaphysic explanation. I don’t think you have to convince us that there is an explanation. But the question is which one. And what is the reason why there is such an explanation in such a situation. That is because religious and all human activities are logics, there is a kind of coherent behaviour inside our minds. Even if we don’t explain it, it’s coherent. But since we are not only anthropologists but also historians, we have to explain what is the logic of the change across time of these different explanations one after the other. And then to give not only the explanation of the mind, but also the explanation of the economic habits, because everything is in equilibrium in time but it changes through time. So as historians we have to explain not only each stage of this equilibrium but also the reason why and how it has changed. So we have to be coherent and each kind of situation has to be completed in its own right and as a process into which it is included.

Catherine Kuzucuoglu: Yes, Damien, I was a little bit puzzled when I was listening to you, because it seemed to me that you presented a talk of your thinking and a kind of a construction and you were explaining what you were putting inside. Puzzled also about some things you said about environment and about relationships between human societies and environment which I don’t agree with. I would have been more convinced if you had followed a more material presentation, because I was lost after a while. And what is your objective, what is your approach, your methodology, your results? I missed a lot of evidence, and I would have preferred a progression where the interpretation comes last and not first. But that may be because I am coming from the natural sciences. I need methodology, explanation of how you get to your results, and then how you interpret your results on some material basis. I know you were speaking about philosophy, and people’s minds – I need facts to adorer, to adore.

Damien Bischoff: I tried to give very briefly the epistemology of my explanation. The hypothetical character of my demonstration was clearly expressed, I think.

Eleni Asouti: I have some more serious philosophical problems with your approach. To me it seems that you are reducing everything to some sort of ‘hunter-gatherer spirit’, the ‘Neolithic spirit’, something essentialist basically and unchangeable. And you’re trying to create what appears to me, sort of, artificial and very abstract oppositions between things. And I can say that probably the reason that you got confused with our data earlier today is that our data and our work basically show that you don’t have such a sharp distinction between an old way of life, possibly a golden age of animal shamanism or totemism or whatever, and an agricultural ideology. Also the things you said concerning Çatalhöyük in particular, that ‘you have a sharp distinction between the domestic and the wild, between the male and the female, between the east and the west’ – actually this is not really the case.

I fully understand your approach in the intellectual sense: to try to draw distinctions and try to work with abstractions and produce ideas and see where we can get from there, from a theoretical point of view. But at the same time I would like to draw attention to what other people have mentioned already, which is that in real life – for want of a better expression – in real life things tend to move not so much in the sense of abstract successions, but in a flow of practice. And this is what we are trying to understand from our own data, and this is basically what archaeologists are probably best equipped to do, which is to try to reconstruct practices, because practice is what basically gives shape to believes about life, to attitudes towards life or nature, and not so much to try to draw oppositions between nature and culture. I would like to say that in this sense I don’t see how different your approach is from Cauvin’s approach, for example. Because he also posits some sort of revolution in mentality, and the substitution of symbols and the naissance des divinités, etc., etc. I can see much more in common between your approach and his approach than perhaps you would like to admit yourself.

Damien Bischoff: First of all, I just quote that I didn’t want to emphasise the differences between hunter-gatherers and farmers. Of course, I made an opposition, but a constructive opposition, there is no impermeability between the two. So I completely agree with you: hunter-gatherers are not exclusive of farming, or farming is not exclusive of hunter-gatherers. But I tried to apply both the hunter-gatherer model and the farming model to one symbolical reality.

Ali Türkcan: I think I should stress the importance of symbolism, as well as faunal and floral analyses, because we can benefit from these ideas, and we should learn how they abstracted nature and organised it. Especially for Çatalhöyük we can benefit from symbolism, because people there were obsessed with symbolism. Symbolism was a glue for aggregation, for the cohesion of the people in Çatalhöyük. There are, for instance, no changing patterns over twelve levels; throughout twelve levels we see the continuation of the same symbols in wall paintings, in bucrania, in mouldings and in seals as well. And seals are very important symbolic objects, especially in Çatalhöyük, showing a continuation as far as the symbolic depictions on them are concerned from Level VI to Level II.

Harald Hauptmann: I understood your paper as the kind of impetus and thinking what can be done for the explanation of these symbolic figures and representations. The problem is, of course, that starting from here is like building a house starting from the roof. I first would make the first step: Göbekli is in the course of excavation, and we have problems to say what the old structures are used for – are they shrines or ritual buildings (I wouldn’t like to say ‘temples’), or are they normal living houses where the hunters depicted the animals they were hunting? And what we are seeing in Göbekli, this is the first step we have to interpret before saying they are shamans and there is a cosmic world and so on. And we first should try to interpret what we have and only then address the symbolic world. If not, we will loose a basis for future discussion. In Nevali Çori, for example, in the beginning agricultural phase, we have a quite different world. Of course, there are traits going on, but for the first time in a larger extent the human being comes into the representations. And of course you can get, by analogy, the idea that there was shamanism, that there was a world here and an upper world. So that’s why the women, or the female part, are combined with birth, life and death, together with birds – vulture. But indeed, within SE Anatolia we can learn more about these changes between hunter-gatherers and agricultural society than in most of the other regions in the Near East, apart from Çatalhöyük. So I would say the first step should be to learn what is the social system. The beliefs, etc., would be a second and a third step, because you can’t separate them from the normal life.

Damien Bischoff: I follow you completely, but I just don’t believe that I am so far away from the social life, because social life has to do with symbolism. I understand your point of view: we have to be modest. But Southeast Anatolia with this stone architecture is a great chance to get a much more complete image of the social life and the symbolism than in regions with kerpiç architecture. I just tried to give a ritual dimension to those buildings, which I believe – I proposed – are not houses. I excavated myself the completion of the Wild Boar Building, and it’s like circles with corridors. People can’t sleep in it; I don’t see where they could sleep! In Göbekli this year we discovered the same pillars with the same hands and the same tie as in what you mention for Nevali Çori. Seeing for the first time such a presentation of men, or ancestors or whatever you want to call them, and animals on the same pillars is an indication that the human dimension is present in the old phase of Göbekli too. And after the rituals, totemism could explain another part of the social life: why are there in Göbekli the Lion’s Building, the Foxes’ Building, the Wild Boar Building, etc.? I mean, it has something to do with the real life.

Eleni Asouti: I agree completely with what Ali said, which is that symbolism is important, and we have to think about it. But I would suggest that symbols are not abstractions, and they are not fixed entities. Symbols are embedded in practices and in daily life. And to pick up just on two of the examples he used for Çatal: we know that wall paintings were not there all the time – they served a purpose and then they were covered. We know that seals probably had a purpose. And we know that things, whatever we call symbolism, actually – and we try to ascribe it to sort of a notional, cultural field away from the concerns of the daily life – actually cannot really be understood in this sense. And if you add to all these things the notion of time too, where you have seasonal changes, where you have construction of time based on practices and the events of daily life, then I think that it’s really difficult to say that you can define symbolism in isolation from practice.

Damien Bischoff: Of course, I agree with you. In my talk I spoke about the definition of culture as being a summary of practices and beliefs, if I remember well. And just to say about the wall paintings recovered, OK – I could have spoken in more detail of Göbekli – I don’t say Göbekli is like this for eternity. This year we found in Göbekli the transition between the ‘old phase’ and the ‘young phase’ – so I am the first aware to pay attention to the daily life and to the evolution of symbolism.

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