Debate

UPPER MESOPOTAMIA IN ITS REGIONAL CONTEXT DURING THE EARLY NEOLITHIC

Harald HAUPTMANN                                                                            
adw.kkh@gmx.de

Nur Balkan-Atli: Prof. Hauptmann’s lecture clearly showed that there are no similarities between Central Anatolia and Southeastern Anatolia, at least not on the level of material culture. And in Central Anatolia, in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, even exotic items are very rare. In Asikli there were just a few cornelian beads, some shells, green obsidian from the east – that’s very interesting, a bracelet, and a blade. And besides that, Nigel Goring-Morris has stated that at Kfar HaHoresh he has cinnabar from Central Anatolia. And as for the symbolic things, at Asikli there is an engraved plaquette with parallels at Jerf el-Ahmar. That’s the only contact that I can find for the moment, besides, of course, the obsidian trade. It is interesting that when the obsidian trade from Central Anatolia ends and Eastern Anatolian obsidian becomes more important for the settlements there, there are more similarities with Central Anatolia and the Southeast. To add to what you said before on the percentages of obsidian in the Southeastern sites, it’s true that in some sites, like Nevali Çori and Göbekli Tepe there are very few pieces of obsidian, and at Gritille and Hayaz it’s the same picture. But now, at Akarçay Tepe and Mezraa-Teleilat on the Euphrates, we’re finding quite a lot of obsidian. So, possibly there is a different distribution system going on.

Mehmet Özdogan: For example, also in Biris Mezarligi, which is in the Urfa–Nevali Çori region, there is more obsidian – well it’s not so much, but there are a few hundreds of obsidian pieces, so I think the trade or exchange routes must have been shifting in time.

Harald Hauptmann: Well, one of the other elements in Nevali Çori is the occurrence of copper, of native or even more developed copper. What exactly is a problem – Pernicka made analyses and it looks more smelted than worked, like in Tell Ramad, Magzalia and other sites. This is a common feature more than other things. There are now also features that show clear connections to the Palestinian region, like Nahal Hemar, especially the masks. And fortunately this year also in Göbekli a little crude mask was found. So we have more examples to correlate.

Mehmet Özdogan: Just one aspect which we also should keep in mind is the burial customs, which we have been overlooking, I think. And there is one interesting tendency with that, which is significant. In the PPN period most of the burials are either in special buildings or in domestic structures, but when we come to the end of the Pre-Pottery period they become extramural in Eastern Anatolia, like in the Near Eastern system. I think, conceptually this is quite an important change: first putting your burials within your buildings, and then putting them outside of a settlement – especially again when compared with the Levant, with this new site Kfar HaHoresh or Nahal Hemar. That’s perhaps a concept of settlement for dead people, a concept already in the spirit of this Near Eastern Neolithic, and I think an extramural cemetery means conceptually a kind of a settlement especially for the dead. In Central Anatolia, however, this intramural custom still continues as we’ve seen at Çatal, and only later on it will become extramural in that area.

Isabella Caneva (chairman): There is now a new proposal, a new interpretation for this skull cult in the Levant. On the basis of the findings in Nahal Hemar and also in Jericho it appears that skulls are grouped in a certain number – buried in pits, or apparently in buildings, but never isolated. So the new proposal is to interpret them as the images of the society as a whole, to interpret them as a group, and not so much as a cult of the ancestors. This could fit in quite well with the grouping in Çayönü, in the Skull Building.

Harald Hauptmann: Of course, also Nevali Çori has this kind of partial inhumations: the skulls lying in the houses on the floors, or just put in the channels. In some cases there were also Hocker put in two buried underneath the floors, or lying in a kind of open space in this massive stone foundation. Sometimes we had the idea that that could be a kind of sacrifice, a Bauopfer so to speak. Has such a possibility been considered in other regions as well?

Isabella Caneva (chairman): In Çayönü we made trace analyses on the lithic tools in the Skull Building. And not only most of the tools revealed to be blades, so tools normally used to cut, but from the analyses it resulted also that they only had cut meat and nervous tissues and bones. Having found this, we proposed that the Skull Building could be considered not only a burial building, but also a ceremonial building where these corpses were manipulated.

Mehmet Özdogan: In Çayönü from the earliest monumental buildings, or special buildings it is clear that they were doing something with some kind of liquid. As for the earliest one, the Flagstone Building, it is certain that the floor was polished and even in order to get some kind of flooding, and also in the Sandstone Building there was a water channel going through it, and the Terrazzo Building also had a kind of channel drainage. So was it blood, or water or wine? It is difficult to say, but considering the presence of the Skull Building it seems more the nastier end of the story than the nicer end. Also in Çayönü, we had in one building these parts of a burial – not a complete skeleton – intentionally put in a clay coffin above the ground, with some tools associated. It was the strangest grave we got and it must have had something to do with the function of that building.

Wendy Matthews: Just to say that red ochre occurs at Çatalhöyük quite a lot, sprinkled on top of a grave or in thresholds or it’s on the bones, or in ovens if ashes are left in an oven or that sort of thing.

Damien Bischoff: In respect to the differentiation made by Mehmet Özdogan between what he called ‘temples’ – although I prefer to retain Jean Perrot’s proposal to see them as places of initiation and passage rites – and domestic buildings, do you believe that in the distribution of the sites inside the Urfa region it is possible that we have some sites in flat places, like Karahan Tepe for example, that are used as plazas, without habitation at all; other settlements that act partly as places for initiation rituals – ritual places if you want – combined with domestic habitation, like in Nevali Çori, as you showed it very well; and still other settlements that are something different again, as Göbekli Tepe for example? The reason why I mentioned Perrot’s proposal is because I think initiation was so important at that time that some places were only initiation places, or ritual places without habitation. As you mentioned, Göbekli is located 800m on top of a hill – it’s not a mountain, but it’s quite a long way from the plain, and there’s no water, and the conditions must have been quite difficult.

Harald Hauptmann: But they would have had a better condition.

Damien Bischoff: OK, better condition – but the landscape and the character of the place is extraordinary in comparison with Urfa-Yeni Yol, for example, which is flat. Do you believe in a distribution, given the complexity of the society, where some places were only meant for initiation purposes, and other ones having domestic habitation, but all of them belonging, as you demonstrated in your article, to an Urfa region ‘culture’?

Harald Hauptmann: We don’t know too much as yet. Even if we have excavated in two sites, and in Çayönü, we should not be thinking we have only this type of ‘colonised’ settlements, which are planned, which are clearly defined settlement types, like in the Grill-Plan Phase in Çayönü and in Nevali Çori. Nevali Çori looks as if a group would have come from somewhere, maybe from Çayönü, they went over the Karacadag, took wild plants, and went to the valley of the Euphrates. It looks like this, and then, after some 400 years, they left the site and went, maybe, to Çatalhöyük, to the Konya Plain – I don’t know. But, it seems we have now at Göbekli this complex on top now – not in the earlier phase, in the late phase – that looks different. It’s a different type of settlement, but after what we know now of the animal bones, they are a community consisting merely of hunter-gatherers. There is no sign of domestication in Göbekli in the nevalliçorien, I must stress this. This is, I would say, a vanishing society of the archaic hunters, and they could see that all the aurochs they had hunted were gone. Because, if you compare the range of the proportions of the game, or wild animals, in the old phase of Göbekli, you have aurochs and in the second or third place you have gazelle. In the nevalliçorien, some hundreds of years later, aurochs doesn’t play a great role anymore, there is only gazelle. And then, of course, in Nevali Çori we have a fully developed agricultural society. So I think we must expect different types of settlements, as you are suggesting, and maybe underneath the old city of Edessa–Urfa, you may have the ‘centre’ with everything you are expecting.