Debate

TRANSFORMATIONS AND SOCIETIES IN THE NEOLITHIC OF CENTRAL ANATOLIA

Frédéric GERARD                                                                                
frederic.gerard@isbank.net.tr

Damien Bischoff: Speaking about transformation and society, what I find interesting in this proposal is the emphasis given to the interaction between humans and environment. As we try to define some modalities between humans and environment in two areas, Cappadocia and the Konya region, we are speaking about instability, stability, fixation strategies, or the alternation between mobility and fixation. But, every single element is to be thought of together. It means that if we are looking only at humans, we will miss a lot of things. But if we are looking only at the environment, it will be the same. And the reflection of Frédéric makes me think that we really touch here, in this relationship, to the very essence of the neolithisation phenomenon. Because it could give us access to the engine, to the real motive of the neolithisation outside of the primary and/or secondary neolithisation areas.

Frédéric Gérard: We are dealing with domestic practices that include a specific relation between humans and their environment. But one of my points is that we have to be aware how important are the domesticated resources vs. the hunted and gathered ones, at each layer of every single period, and to search for the evolution of these respective dependencies. Since the very beginnings of Asikli, and of Çatal, there can be domestic practices or even full domestication, I have nothing against this. But how much did the people rely on these practices for their subsistence mode? That’s a fundamental point because the relations between humans and their environment involve a direct link with the social practices, with the whole social system. What is important here is to know precisely for each period the proportion of this reliance vs. the game one, in order to evaluate in the long term the impact of farming and the agricultural practices on the social system.

Marcel Otte: For the sake of discussion, I just want to tag along the question of neolithisation. Damien, do you think it is that clear cut? Because what I can see from the Anatolian Plateau is that there is not one single process going on there. In the whole Mediterranean you have different processes leading to neolithisation in different ways. And I don’t think there is only one single phenomenon that you can define as being the Neolithic, especially here in Central Anatolia where we are in a core situation. We are not just on the side of the whole Anatolian country, we have such a long-term laboratory of processes. I don’t think we can define neolithisation just as a relationship between nature and humans. I think it is much more complicated. In Europe, we can see much clearer what is happening, but here, I don’t think it is so clear because the process is going on. It’s not finished. It’s not over.

Hijlke Buitenhuis: I have problems with your idea that at the end of Asikli people start to become nomadic or pastoralists, therefore breaking up the site. Also we have to explain why Asikli actually stops. But on the other hand it is a pattern we see all over the Near East where we have this Early Neolithic. All these early long-term settlements after a certain amount of time start to collapse – and if you look at a number of these sites that’s all in the range of 600–800 years. For some of them there is evidence of environmental degradation. But for others there isn’t. And it’s certainly an intriguing possibility that you bring up: do indeed these long-term settlements become, at a certain moment, because of the developments, socially unstable and do they therefore break up? There may not be a direct link to subsistence patterns or subsistence changes, or even material changes, but it may be an internal social patterning that is happening. We see it in North Syria, we see it in South Anatolia, and we see it in the Southern Levant. It seems to be a pattern that is almost inherent in long-term Neolithic settlements.

Frédéric Gérard: You are right – there must have been a big problem to say the least. But I view it as a hypothesis, only for discussion. The solution was maybe found in nomadism, or semi-nomadism.

Hijlke Buitenhuis: I would rather call it pastoralism. Because this is the period where you would start expecting domestic sheep.

Frédéric Gérard: The word was wrongly used in fact. I wanted to speak about semi-nomadism and especially of course pastoralism. I view it as that they are going to the mountains and having pastures in the summer for bringing the sheep there. Going with that they would have had small settlements in the valleys that we have not found.

Louise Martin: Frédéric asked how important are subsistence practices, and I think that’s an incredibly interesting question and not so very simple. Talking from the experience that we have about Çatalhöyük, subsistence needs to be broken down into two components. You have production – how people get their plants and their animals, and you have how they consume them, how they eat them. This is after all food, which is an incredibly social arena, not just an economic one. And so from our experience at Çatal it is clearly extremely important to be able to get the right foods for the right occasions, whether these seem to be private consumption, domestic consumption, or public displays of consumption. So people are very dependent on their subsistence practices for some form of social cohesion. Also gaining of nutrients is obviously uppermost. And we have evidence of people getting the smallest bit of marrow out of bits of bone. So clearly it was important. But also to go back to production, and to consider the use of the landscape in this matter, my feeling is that that was the way that social groups must have become completely familiar with their landscapes, where you have hunters using mountains, you have herders using pastures, people using marshes – this sort of embeddedness which has to do with everyday practices. And we do have evidence of craft specialisation. Most people in these sites, I would imagine, would have been involved in subsistence practices at one level or another.

But to come to another point, how important is subsistence necessarily in the evolution of sites, in the changes that we see? There is an argument that once you have your subsistence sorted out and get locked into it on some sort of rhythmical, seasonal basis, other things can change at your sites, when the subsistence doesn’t change at all. So you know it doesn’t necessarily have to change along with everything else. So I feel that you can get locked into practices which can be fairly successful, as a farmer, as an agriculturalist, as a herder. And then other things can fluoresce, cultural things can fluoresce on top on that.

Frédéric Gérard: This is very interesting. As you said, in fact all is linked. That’s the real point: how subsistence patterns are linked to the way of dealing with social practices, the way of building a house, etc. All is linked and we have to apprehend it as a whole, as a global system. And in fact we have to recognise that we are not so good at this. There are people interested only in lithics, some only in ceramics, others only in architecture, whatever. To put all things together, which is something of course very difficult, is a real challenge. That’s why we have to think in the long range. You are telling that there is no evident direct link between the subsistence mode and the changing patterns, and of course it’s not necessary to change altogether. But on the long term, when you get first a society of hunter-gatherers relying on a lot of different game possibilities, and when you turn to a growing importance of farmers only relying on sheep, the social system is directly changing. And my point was only to deal with this long range in order to understand the whole transformations.

Roger Matthews: Well, I had two things that I wanted to raise. The first was Fred’s comment about Çatalhöyük in the later levels and the fact that there seems to be some fairly dynamic change that happens from about Level V onwards. I know Bleda Düring has written about this and perhaps he will talk about it tomorrow. But something that should be borne in mind is the fact that Level VI is destroyed by fire, whether accidentally or deliberately. And that in some way provides a kind of blank slate as it were for the next level above that, which must have some bearing upon the apparent cessation of consistency there. The other point was to ask Douglas if he in his multi-period survey of the Konya Plain had any sort of inkling or evidence of smaller sites that might fit into a picture of cyclical pastoralism?

Frédéric Gérard: As far as I understood, in Çatal as in other sites, the fire must have been intentional. People really burned their houses and destroyed all that they had. So it was a specific choice to change the way they lived. Of course we have to understand why is it that they wanted to change. It reminds me of the fires ending, for instance, Hacilar Levels VI and II. Fires like that must have happened intentionally, not accidentally.

Douglas Baird: Obviously from survey evidence it can be quite difficult to know whether you are dealing with a particularly small settlement that might result from a relatively permanent village farming community, or with a site belonging to a nomadic pastoralist who spends six months in one place and six months in another place, for example. So that’s quite tricky and I couldn’t say honestly whether we had any sites that might fall into that category or might not. There is one site, I think, that might be relevant here, however, which in a sense the survey, or the early stages of the survey, helped to rediscover, and that’s Pinarbasi, the actual rock shelter area in Pinarbasi which was excavated with Trench B. Hence the reference is to Pinarbasi B, but it’s really all part of one site, and A and B are just different trenches on that site. In Trench B at Pinarbasi there were fragments of Neolithic structures that are very slight in character. They are basically cuts into underlying deposits lined with stone uprights. They look exactly what you might expect for tent foundations and that sort of thing. We see a very similar thing on nomadic pastoralist sites in the Southern Levant, for example. And it very much looks like that people were visiting the Pinarbasi rock shelter for short periods of time during the Ceramic Neolithic – may be into the Early Chalcolithic – herding sheep and goats and also knapping a little bit of obsidian while they were going. Yes, possibly nomadic pastoralists, possibly people moving out from Çatalhöyük, taking their herds out, you know, in particular seasons. But the point is that at all periods one may well imagine mobile groups herding sheep and goats once sheep and goat herding starts in that environment. It is just difficult to find the evidence. Perhaps at the end of the Asikli sequence there may be already mobile communities moving around. Some of them may have herded animals. Some of them may not. Some of them may be hunter-gatherers. It’s difficult to find the evidence, but one shouldn’t therefore imagine a transformation because we haven’t got earlier evidence.

Laurens Thissen: Frédéric, you said: ‘the Chalcolithic people are the real Neolithic’ – not only a definite blow, I would think, to the old terminology. Could you a little bit explain that, and give your reasons for using this provocative image?

Frédéric Gérard: It’s only because for many people the Neolithic means fully domesticated subsistence patterns. And actually it’s only during the Early Chalcolithic that we get it at the full range. So it means that if we want to be coherent with the “domesticate” definition, if it’s only farmers during the Early Chalcolithic, and not the old relation with the environment, that is the old way of thinking of the hunters-gatherers, then the ‘real’ Neolithic people we find in the Chalcolithic period! So of course, what was before, it’s a different civilization, different cultures, ‘aceramic’ or not, whatever you want to call them, but at least it’s a different spirit. In my opinion, Asikli and Çatal are the expressions of cultures much more related to a hunting-gathering way of thinking, as Damien will argue tomorrow. And it’s only during the Chalcolithic that we observe real farming systems, so that you have the ‘real’ Neolithic. Of course, it’s only a question of terminology and the image I used was only to make people react. But as far as I’m speaking only on the long-term trajectory, we have to conceive two worlds.

Eleni Asouti: Well, I actually have a slight problem with this sort of evolutionary, linear thinking, and basically with your definition of agricultural production. Agricultural production is something entirely social. It has nothing to do with biology, it has nothing to do with morphological changes in plants and animals. As I see it, people could have been practising fully-fledged agriculture without actually feeling the need, or having that sort of impact on plants and animals. Subsistence practices are a means to an end. They are not something opposed to social realities. So, to touch also on something that Damien said before, what is the essence of neolithisation? I mean, it’s why it must have been a very contingent region. For example, if Central Anatolia had successful hunter-gatherers before the appearance of domestication and if they were very happy with what they were doing, they would have continued doing it. Obviously there must be a reason why suddenly you see all these Neolithic settlements appearing and people doing at least plant cultivation. Why? – maybe because plant cultivation, in this particular area, gave them the means to stay there and do things that otherwise the natural environment, for example, couldn’t support them to do. My point is that at the end of the day, you have to see these things as interconnected. And you cannot define the Neolithic, which is an essentially social process, by reducing it to some biological or morphological reality. It’s like talking about, for example, how people run their daily lives on the basis of whether they had smaller or bigger sheep for example. What matters is the production.

Frédéric Gérard: Yes, I agree, I have nothing against what you say. Of course, subsistence patterns have to deal with daily practices. But my point was to put emphasis on the fact that we cannot stay on the eye level to understand what were the reasons for the evolution of societies. You told that people must have been very happy with their way of life, and I am also sure of it. I mean, they were never conscious that ten years before, one hundred years before, or one thousand years before, they – or their ancestors – were totally different. And of course people are always like this, they think they are doing the best. And the best way of living, is adapting yourself at every moment, at every second, to the best fit to your own environment. But for us archaeologists, it’s our function to try to understand in the long range – one thousand years, two thousand, three thousand years – and to make separations in the non-linear transformations of societies. Of course, separation is not reality, But we have to do it. It’s heuristic. Another point: when I’m talking about the proportion of the reliance on domestic resources vs. the game ones, here could be a key to understand the transformations of societies: it’s like an empty bottle, half empty or half full whatever, but when you add something in it, it’s making the ‘real’ change, it’s making the social change.

Eleni Asouti: Well, just two very brief comments on that. First of all, I agree with you to a certain extent, but I want to return to that with summarising what I was trying to say before. Which is that people in the Aceramic period, for example, may well have perceived themselves as doing agriculture. And people in the Early Chalcolithic have done exactly the same thing. And the only reason why we see differences there could have been boiling down to changing relations of property, territoriality, of whatever. This doesn’t mean that people were not doing agriculture before, or that they were doing more agriculture afterwards. You see different facets of essentially the same story. This is one comment. The other comment is that I find it very difficult to entertain this idea of some sort of regional evolution that we would be able to trace completely, and to reach conclusions so easily – because what we are dealing with basically are fragments of different living strategies in Central Anatolia during a relatively short period, and having excavated or analysed very few sites basically. You have Pinarbasi that may have been a hunting camp or, as Douglas was suggesting, a pastoralist site. You have Asikli with people there doing completely different things. Then you have Çatal, where people were doing completely different things again. To me at least, it looks as if we have snapshots of a story there, that to see completely in a sort of evolutionary continuum and trying to fit into a line, would perhaps be doing injustice to the diversity of our data.

Frédéric Gérard: Of course, you are right: some snapshots. But our point is to do as a restorer of old, good films from the cinémathèque, to put all the fragments together and to restore the film.

Francesca Balossi Restelli: I think what Eleni was saying is an important point. And I heard another point coming up quite a lot of times – what Damien was saying before for instance – and I feel very uncomfortable with this idea of a hunter-gatherer system being like the archaic way of thinking –

Frédéric Gérard: It’s not archaic at all. It’s absolutely not my point. It’s a different civilization. It’s a different way of thinking. It’s a different way of life. I think hunter-gatherers or farmers, it’s not only a way of subsistence, of course not. It’s very reductive to say so. It’s a real way of thinking, a way of life. But we have very few words to express it and very few data to focus on. It’s not archaic. Not at all. It’s a very complex society of course.

Francesca Balossi Restelli: In any way, you use it as sort of an evolutionary thing. You have the hunter-gatherers, and then you have the fully agricultural societies. What I want to point out is that when you do have full agricultural systems, you still have hunter-gatherers. You have people who choose to be hunter-gatherers when fully agricultural systems are operating. And these two different kinds of economic systems are even related to each other. People meet each other. They exchange things between each other. This is one point. The other point was on the terminological question of the Early Chalcolithic and the Neolithic, the Early Chalcolithic being for you the real Neolithic. What I wanted to say is that you have fully Neolithic producing economies before the Early Chalcolithic. If you think of Hassuna - Umm Dabaghiyah cultures, these are specialised in food production, but still dated as Neolithic.

Sevil Gülçur: I have a problem: We are always speaking about social collapse, but we don’t even know how the big ‘Neolithic towns’ got to an end. We don’t have any indication about the last levels of Asikli, which were eroded away. Then, we have a shifting in settlement from one point to the next one – Musular. In the nearest vicinity of Asikli Höyük we have many different Neolithic sites, which have not been excavated and for which we don’t have material studies. For example, there is Çakilbasi, which is a really huge settlement, and its continuation Yapilipinar, that could be just the same period as Çatalhöyük (we found there Çatalhöyük-type leaf points); we have also Yellibelen and Sirçantepe. But we don’t know their chronological, functional and territorial relations with Asikli.

Frédéric Gérard: Of course, after study of all these sites, we can get a totally different picture. Not so totally different, because we have still to explain how and how much the big sites collapsed or in fact split into different systems. What are the reasons why? Growing population of course must have played a role in these things, even if it’s only a part of the picture. When you have an increasing number of people you have to deal with them. Problems to be solved are proportional to the size of the group, and there is a pressing need for its representation. You have to decide who is the chief of the village, the chief of the quarter who would tell to the head of each family where exactly he has to build his house, for instance. It’s a social organisation requiring more complexity, and so it’s creating different problems, bringing new conflicts. But, it’s part of the game. In Asikli, we can see very clearly the organisation of plans into parcels, which shows that there was a planning. So, we can claim that the invention of the parcel is released in Asikli.

Bleda Düring: I think we touch upon a very important issue here and that is the question why these major sites were abandoned after a long period of occupation. And there is always a traditional explanation of large sites that are abandoned: they became too large, they couldn’t be organised anymore. It’s a kind of cyclical argument. My question then is, why do these settlements become large in the first place? What social model can we project on it? And how did it come about that after a while that social model wasn’t successful anymore? Did they change their organisation of society? Did new fashions come into being, did their group, the scale of their groups alter? Do you have any ideas on this matter?

Frédéric Gérard: In Asikli it’s maybe because they haven’t changed that there was a problem. Maybe it’s an accumulation of conflicts altogether growing. I liked a lot the idea in your Anatolian Studies article about Çatal, concerning a group of thirty houses which were linked together forming a sort of neighbourhood. This is perfectly fitting with the Asikli evidence. But, as I said, the trajectories for Asikli and Çatal were different. The choices, the relations, the environment must have been different.

Bleda Düring: If I may just elaborate a little bit on my idea – and that’s a bit speculative – the Early Neolithic is very much about large groups coming together, wanting to identify with one another. And that’s why you have these enormous sites, not just in Central Anatolia but in other regions as well. Somehow they felt like that was important for them. And they connect to all kinds of rituals, and in Southeast Anatolia they built these ritual buildings, and in Central Anatolia they just aggregate in a kind of beehive kind of way. And at a certain time, to my idea, the scale changes. The groups become smaller. They fraction into smaller units.

Frédéric Gérard: Especially in Çatal: why do they rely so much on symbolism? Maybe because they had to prove that they were still connected to the old system. In a changing system you have this type of expression. The more you are changing, the more you have to prove that you are still attached to the soil, to the ancestors, and you are not changing in fact. That’s the traditional way to act – when you have to adapt yourself. That might also explain why in Asikli they were much more conservative: it was not necessary for them to prove constantly that they were still attached to the ancestors because they were still attached in fact, in practice.

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