Debate

CULTURAL DYNAMICS OF THE CENTRAL ANATOLIAN NEOLITHIC: THE EARLY CERAMIC NEOLITHIC - LATE CERAMIC NEOLITHIC TRANSITION

Bleda DÜRING                                                            
bduring@hotmail.com

Wendy Matthews: You’ve gone for the very big picture and come up with very interesting patterns. And there’s always the mixture of the large picture and then the particularistic changes. And one of the things in the buildings is that there are small-scale changes. So, for example, in the early excavations of what Mellaart called Shrine 10, which is the one that’s in the Anatolian Museum with mother goddess and stacked skulls – Mellaart excavated that through its early levels and that’s a very interesting building to look at through time. And it’s now Building 17 that’s being excavated in Level IX. And there we see a shift of the oven from the south to the north, but still no wall paintings on the south wall. So there are these patterns within the buildings. I am just trying to get at the small-scale changes. And then the wall paintings; there are up to four of them through the life history of the building, which can be from 70 to 100 years. So I just wondered what happened to this building in Level V, after the fire?

Bleda Düring: It’s not being rebuilt. ([Note by Bleda Düring]: This statement is false. In fact building 3 in Level V is the successor to building 10 in VIA. This building is one of the five buildings of Level V that do have continuity with Level VIA. Building 3 of Level V contains two mouldings, four hearths, and four platforms among other matters. It does not rate among the REB category discussed in my paper. Finally, a Level IV successor for building 3, Level V, is not documented (the Level IV plan is much smaller then the Level V plan), but this might be due to partial erosion of Level IV.) I totally agree this is the weakness of this whole study I made. I mean that I based myself totally on this older material published by Mellaart. And while it gives a good stratigraphy I think, and a good overall view, it lacks detail. Also it has not been published adequately. So I totally agree that we need to get more detail into the picture.

Wendy Matthews: But I think your large picture provides a very good framework in which to start looking at these hypotheses. You’ve raised a whole range of interesting questions. And that particular building goes from being very elaborate in Level VI at its latest, but in Level VII was the one with the supposed cut-out reindeer. And in Level VIII it was very plain. One of the things Mellaart said in his final publication is that he longed for the day when he could excavate below that to find out the history of that building. And two figurines have been found within that and traces of wall painting. So, it’s a very interesting whole building at Çatalhöyük.

Bleda Düring: Also interesting is that if you look at the growth of the settlement, you can see that starting with a few buildings – which are the older ones – gradually other buildings seem to be built around them. Heinrich and Seidl have published an article in 1969 stating that these were perhaps the houses where they originated from, the houses that they were associated with. I have not touched upon that in my talk, but some of those buildings contain, I think, many burials – the building with the most burials contains some 44 of them. Many other buildings around it contain none. And either we say that only the inhabitants of that specific building were buried, or alternatively we could posit that this building has a special function also for the people who lived in other buildings. And so I think that the concept of special buildings, or whatever you want to call them, is appropriate.

Craig Cessford: I must admit that what you’ve shown is very nice and some of it I agree with, but I am not convinced by the level analysis that you put into Mellaart’s data – almost seems like over-interpreting what he has actually provided us with. What we have from the sixties is very contradictory, very partial. Reconstructing what was going on in individual buildings is very difficult. What Mellaart plans as a level is generally not actually a unified event. Buildings aren’t built and abandoned at the same point in time as far as we can tell. Most of them would have had their own individual trajectories. So in a sense, what Mellaart presents as a level is a composite temporal event, which wouldn’t be so bad apart from the fact that we can tell buildings change massively through their life histories. So that, looking at the level plans of Mellaart from the sixties, I would say you are looking at a century, quite frequently, between the earliest and the latest material that you are seeing on one plan that you are treating as contemporary.

Then there are specific problems with the access analysis, because there you are only dealing with the excavated part of the site. Well, there is a possibility that that’s okay, although I’d find it very problematical. The fact is that, as far as we can tell, Mellaart’s excavation strategy is actually quite biased. He is very interested in the buildings that he labels as ‘shrines’. So he tends to focus on those, those tend to be the central bits of where he dug, simply because that was where he focused on in the earlier levels, when you are getting down to Levels VII and VIII. So I think quite a lot of the patterning that comes up from Mellaart’s plans is actually a construct of his grand excavation strategy of what he is interested in; we can’t take it as the whole site, I don’t think you can reconstruct that access to buildings on the basis of what we can see in his plans, because none of them have the edge of the site on them.

And the other thing I would say is that, although there are changes between VIA and V in terms of material culture, these tend not to be abrupt changes. And with things like the lithics and the ceramics you’re often talking about changes in the percentages of different types of material culture. The figurines, for instance, although they attract a lot of attention, that’s actually only one small subset of the total range of figurines that are going on in the site. And also, these are actually quite rare categories of material culture. What comes across as being quite abrupt when you look at the depositional context that much of this material ends up in, there you could again be talking about changes in a century. And from what I can see at Çatalhöyük, the picture is mainly one of stability of material culture in the grand sense. But there are lots of little changes going on throughout the sequence. And in a sense, privileging ones that happen to occur about the same time, I don’t think there is more change going on then, than is going on at any other hundred-year period in the history of the site. Those are just a few particular ones that, sort of, stand out.

Bleda Düring: I totally agree with you that the picture provided by Mellaart is a bit static and not totally reliable. But as far as I can see – and I am basing myself here on the work by the present excavation team – the basic stratigraphy of Mellaart is more or less sound. Especially, I think, the transition between Levels V and VIA, which is a burned level, is a very clear separator between the two. Other separations are perhaps more problematical, but this one is very clear. Then the changes – the change in the obsidian industry, for instance, as published by Conolly, is a very abrupt one. And also the changes in architecture at this transition are very clear.

Craig Cessford: Certainly at the gross level, Mellaart’s stratigraphy is fine in terms of which building is on top of which building. But, in terms of a level as a concurrent event, I would have great trouble with that. The obsidian change has undergone recent reassessment, as far as I understand it, based on new sourcing work. And I must admit the fire has always given me troubles. As I remember it, Mellaart didn’t realise it was a single event at the start and some of his attributions to this change are retrospective. And then he also seems to begin to doubt it himself later on. The fire as a single uniform event across the entire site does not convince me.

Bleda Düring: Maybe Wendy knows more about it because she re-investigated these aspects.

Wendy Matthews: From Mellaart’s old sections, when we studied them, you can sometimes see several buildings levelled at the same time and built on top of them. So some of those levels are true. But with the fire – from the photographs that are published you can actually see a whole range of buildings that have been burnt at one time, and that were standing to the same heights. So there are several adjacent buildings there. With regard to the burning, whatever its cause, it would have been traumatic really, I think. Certainly a major change. And there are differences afterwards. Things like there are the large communal ovens, which is perhaps to suggest different sorts of social interacting, rather than just the ovens within each building. And they are more open. Whether that’s partly to prevent further spread of fire is a possible functionalistic explanation. But with such an event, a fire or an earthquake, there may be more social changes afterwards. There is more sense of wanting to change.

Craig Cessford: How widespread the fire was for the site, is something that we don’t know about. I mean, I don’t see evidence that it was actually affecting the entire mound. There is no way to prove that, but I don’t think we can make the case for that. And again, you bring in the ovens but those are a Level II, Level III development which I think –

Wendy Matthews: – And Level IV.

Craig Cessford: The proper examples are Level III and Level II. And that’s part of what I mean about these changes. You can produce changes between any of the levels at Çatalhöyük if you wanted to, in terms of material culture or architecture. And as far as I am concerned, there is no break at any real point. There is just a constant process of small changes occurring.

Nurcan Yalman: I just want to ask Louise about the subsistence economy change between the levels.

Louise Martin: From what we have seen this morning, it shows only the gross level of analysis just to present the relative proportions of taxa. And we really need a much more detailed analysis to see whether consumption patterns do change across this divide, although the rough proportions of animals before Level VI and into Level V at that transition didn’t change particularly. There may be other things going on that we are in the process of exploring, such as the seasonal patterns that show up; differences in the way animal foods are being processed, which is evident through things like faunal remains; where they are being deposited; what is used symbolically. So I wouldn’t claim by any means that we’ve done an exhaustive analysis on that yet. And clearly it’s something that we want to look at. But the general pattern of production doesn’t show the changes that are apparently evident in things like the lithics from Conolly.

Eleni Asouti: Yes, plantwise not much changes. But if you talk about subsistence you should always bring into consideration things like storage, for example. And we can’t really argue for a process of change there, because we actually haven’t found many storage contexts, which means not features that couldn’t be used as storage areas, but actually things inside them. So, yes, at certain level you could say that storage facilities are everywhere but we haven’t found too much actually being stored in it. So we don’t know, and this is what I want to get at. We don’t know if there are any changes in the quantities and the types of material that were stored, basically. And we also have evidence that much of the storage facilities could have been constructed from perishable material, like baskets and things like that. So it’s a thing that it’s hard to quantify, and I agree with Louise: we don’t really know at present. We need to work more on that to see if there were any changes through time.

Douglas Baird: I had two or three things. I thought it might be easier to take them one at a time. So first of all, I guess, as I understand it, you are saying your ritual buildings play an integrative function within rather localised groups of families or households at Çatalhöyük, which is a very neat idea. I like that. But as I understand it, you have buildings distinguished on similar grounds after Level VI. And therefore I just wondered why you should see much change in social structure if you’re seeing continuity actually in terms of the roles of these structures even though there may be slightly different access patterns and so forth within the community.

Bleda Düring: Yes, I do think that this concept of ritual buildings lasted throughout the whole Çatalhöyük sequence. But for me the difference is important whether such a special building is located very deeply in a cluster of buildings; which means that anybody who wanted to go there would have to pass a couple of roofs of buildings surrounding it. And so it would have been very hard to do this while not being noticed. And at the moment the building is free standing, it sort of changes, because it can be accessed more easily. And so the nature of this building, the place it has in society, although it functions in a way which is similar, becomes somewhat different. It is more open. But yes, the basic function is still similar I think.

Douglas Baird: So, rather subtle changes in social organisation? Potentially?

Bleda Düring: No I wouldn’t say that. I think also the ritual buildings are just normal buildings where people lived in. I mean, all of the buildings in Çatalhöyük seem like lived-in buildings with all of the normal domestic features. Even if in the earlier levels we only have a small part of it, I am assuming that the whole settlement was more or less similar. But I do think that not just anybody lived in any of these buildings that form such a cluster of buildings. The people who lived in them were somehow associated with one another. They built a kind of social unit. When the buildings are separated, then that is a profound change. That’s why I think that the social units became much smaller.

Douglas Baird: It’s interesting – where obviously one could go physically, and where one might be allowed to go, is not necessarily the same thing. I just wondered whether you had any way of dealing with that problem? And what you could map as potential access routes and the extent to which people were allowed to walk across each other’s roofs or go into courtyards, may be very different things?

Bleda Düring: Basically, my main idea is that people who were allowed to enter these roofs where people who lived in that certain area of the site; and that all other people could only go there by invitation. This is not a kind of open street. We have on these roofs not only the access to the buildings, but people store goods there, as I understand it. Maybe they sit on it as well and perform activities. So it’s a kind of front garden, if you compare it with a modern European situation.

Douglas Baird: I thought that’s what you might be thinking, which is why I asked it. Because I wondered whether it’s necessarily any different later on, where apparently access might have been easier. People might not have been allowed to approach the immediate environs of some of these buildings, even though they were no longer completely surrounded by other buildings.

Bleda Düring: If you have open areas around these buildings, and if you don’t partition them in any way – but there could have been partitions that are not visible anymore –, then it seems like this is something like our public domain, something open to everybody. On the other hand, there also could have been dead-end streets, which were again only open to inhabitants who lived on this space. Mainly I think it was much easier to go somewhere without being seen, so that the social control would have been much less.

Douglas Baird: The other main issue I wanted to raise was that you might be seeing these developments as part of a wider, concurrent or contemporary picture. Is this just something that’s happening through time, perhaps rather more in the way that Craig’s saying – although you would give it a different emphasis –, to one community gradually changing over time? Would you see this as part of a wider set of transformations in Central Anatolia?

Bleda Düring: Yes, I do think this different kind of society, which starts in the Late Neolithic, and goes on in the Early Chalcolithic, has something to do with this transition: a different kind of society was being ‘born’, with smaller social units.

David Small: I just wanted to point out that we’re not detecting these cluster relationships around what you call ‘ritually elaborate buildings’ in the new excavations. And to some of us it seems like the patterns are created by the way Mellaart excavated the site, in that he was looking for what you call ‘ritually elaborate buildings’ – what he called ‘shrines’ –, and if he went of in a direction he wasn’t finding a shrine he went in another direction. So a lot of this is not necessarily a typical pattern of the mound, but an indication of how he excavated the building – or how he excavated the site. So to create patterns out of that seems to be extremely arbitrary with such a small amount excavated at this time, and with the new excavations not supporting necessarily the idea of clusters, or the interpretations that Mellaart came up with.

Bleda Düring: I agree that Mellaart had his own objectives, but if you see that this number of ritual buildings is more or less – well at least in the early levels where we have a lot of buildings – constant at about 20 %, I think that might be a good indication that this really is something. So maybe he tried to find only shrines, but he didn’t. He found the buildings around them as well.

David Small: But you also have to consider that he referred to what we find as ‘midden spaces’, he referred to those as ‘courtyards’. So they weren’t public access spaces, they were places were things were dumped. So in all the area around his excavation area we know there are houses, so for you to say that only certain people were allowed on certain rooftops – if your house was in the centre of the mound, you would have to cross a number of people’s houses to get to that house. So there would have to be some form of rights of access. That’s not using what he called ‘courtyards’, because if the courtyards are actually midden spaces, they are not going to go through the middens to get to their house. So, it’s a matter of relating what we’re finding to what Mellaart was looking for.

Bleda Düring: Presently, it’s not clear whether, for instance, there did exist some kind of small streets separating settlement blocks, or whether this whole site was just one continuous expansion of houses.

Douglas Baird: As I understood it, Bleda, you’re not actually using Mellaart’s so-called shrines as your ritual buildings, you’ve re-looked at the evidence and you’re using some buildings that Mellaart didn’t think were shrines, so you haven’t been completely restricted by Mellaart’s strategies, would that be fair to say? I understand what David’s point is, that obviously Mellaart’s strategies were such that we only have a partial picture of what was there and his strategies influenced that, but at the same time is it true to say that your interpretation of these buildings isn’t merely following Mellaart’s?

Bleda Düring: Yes, it’s true, I didn’t. Many buildings which Mellaart called shrines, I don’t call shrines, and other buildings I call shrines (REBs) are not in Mellaart’s shrine list, so they are different buildings often, not all the time.

David Small: One other point. If I’m correct, you also combine buildings that Mellaart did not combine, so you have what you would consider one building that has double functions, it has two storage rooms, two large rooms with hearths, or some cases you group what he had defined as three buildings into one building.

Bleda Düring: Yeah, I tried to avoid this issue of how to define a building at Çatalhöyük, because it’s a difficult discussion. I made the assumption that each building had its own roof and that party walls were not in use. If you look at the plans at Çatalhöyük you can see that most units have their own walls. So basically what I did was to look at the walls in the plans and to see which walls were under the same roof. But of course then you rely on the reliability of these plans, and we all know that they are not totally reliable. But I just tried to get a quick overview of what these data can tell us, bearing in mind the drawbacks of Mellaart’s data.

Isabella Caneva (chairman): I think that what is interesting in this communication is to put the accent on space division and circulation and access especially, which are the strongest elements that reflect social organisation in villages. What I wanted to say, however, is that for the interpretation it’s too early, because these elements are culturally determined, so it’s a circular argumentation. How can you say which kind of society is this one, if you don’t know which role each element you analyse has in the specific society?

Bleda Düring: Of course, mostly in archaeology you have a lack of good data and at a certain point you want to make a story, and that’s what I did. And I agree that there are many problems with this story, but I still try to make this story. If somebody proves me wrong that’s completely OK with me.

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