Debate
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTING AND EVOLUTION FROM THE 9th TO THE 5th MILLENNIUM CAL BC IN CENTRAL ANATOLIA. An introduction to the study of relations between environmental conditions and the development of human societies
Catherine KUZUCUOĞLU 
kuzucuogl@netcourrier.com
Douglas Baird: First of all, I was impressed by the way that Catherine indicated some of the potential importance of our understanding of the environmental and geomorphological evidence, in terms of major developments in human behaviour, if you like. There are obvious contrasts between Cappadocia and the Beysehir area and the Konya Plain. And that has quite exciting implications, I think. For example, we have to start thinking about why people should start settling what is after all a relatively arid area, like the Konya Plain, what appears to be so early. Why the Konya Plain, with less then 300mm of annual precipitation? And perhaps there was settlement in the Beysehir area, but we haven’t found it; but why then aren’t we finding it in the Beysehir area, for example, in the ECA I period? So I think there are some interesting questions there. Geomorphological work around Çatalhöyük is pointing to the fact that early environments in that area were areas of extensive flooding. Again, these are challenging environments. Why should people so early on in the history of settled life and the development of agriculture be choosing flooded environments like this, which are not necessarily easy to manage, as we can perhaps discuss. So I think that it shows that there are some challenging questions to understand here that can change our overall view of the developments of sedentary sites in agriculture.
The second thing that occurred to me in listening to this is the importance of reconstruction at very localized past environments. Obviously, Catherine is giving us a very broad picture as appropriate to the whole of Central Anatolia. But we have to translate that into very local human terms. We’ve seen maps commissioned by the organizers of the Table Ronde covering a vast area. But in terms of what it meant for human settlement in the area I am interested in, for example around Çatalhöyük on the Konya plain – what are we dealing with? Are the alluvial fans relevant for example to the ECA I period at all? Are we dealing with completely different environments 9000 years ago? So we have to look at this question of how much we can use this general geomorphological information, how much we have to look at local past environments.
I’d also like to go on and stress one other point in relation to the human scale of things. As I’ve already mentioned, geomorphologists around Çatalhöyük, Neil Roberts and Pete Boyer, are conceiving the period of the first occupation of Çatalhöyük East in the Late Aceramic Neolithic and also in the Early Ceramic Neolithic, as a period in which that area witnessed extensive flooding. And it’s in this situation, I think, that we particularly have to have a close dialogue with our geomorphological colleagues. What would such extensive floodings actually mean for local communities? Were floods, the extensive floods, once every year, once every three years, once every five years? And those answers are important for us as archaeologists working on a human scale. So we have to try and get down to that sort of detailed level, I think, in order to understand human behaviour.
And the final point, I am impressed about the relatively widespread evidence for abandonment in the ECA V period that Catherine pointed out and Laurens has already referred to. And I was intrigued that Catherine preferred to avoid an environmental, or at least a climatic explanation, which is encouraging from a geomorphologist. But again perhaps we have to be a little bit cautious. It may be that there are no large-scale climatic changes. But of course there could be changes in things like the regime of the Çarsamba river on the Konya Plain and other local rivers that could affect settlements in profound ways. So we have to be a little careful again thinking about the scale of what is happening. So those were the thoughts that came to my mind when I heard the papers.
Mehmet Özdogan: I was also very glad to hear Catherine thinks in a kind of attitude far removed from environmental determinism. Concerning all this environmental evidence, as we generalize with environmental evidence and with botanical evidence, I think it would be interesting to see how this matches with the faunal evidence and the hunting strategies which we know from sites with long durations, like Çatalhöyük and Asikli, and how it matches especially with the amount of cattle hunting going on with Asikli and I think also with Çatal. And I have one more point: certainly the Lakes District, the Konya Plain and Cappadocia are environmentally very different areas, but are there also radical differences between the cultural entities of these regions? I think that the environment was not the basic factor in seeing the cultural distribution. For example, as far as I can see, for most of the time there is a certain similarity between the Lakes District and the Konya district, with cultures merging into each other. And I still believe that the Cappadocian cultures are not too much detached from the Central Anatolian dry land. So I think that the environment was not the basic factor that determines the culture boundaries.
Geoffrey Summers (chairman): I was very struck indeed by what Catherine said about no changes in total rainfall but changes in the seasonality of the rainfall, but it only takes a shift from April back into March or on into later in the summer, to affect the ability to grow crops on the Central Anatolian Plateau, and in that respect I wondered whether the people who studied tree rings have any way into a closer seasonality rather than annual rainfall. One more comment, another question for Catherine. I was struck by the maps she presented. And she said that the Kizilirmak basin formed a clear boundary between what is Central Anatolia in these maps and what is further north. And I’d like to know why the Seyfe Gölü basin, for instance, is different, or is it indeed different from the Tuz Gölü basin? Perhaps Peter would like to answer first.
Peter Kuniholm: One comment about the distribution of the rainfall. We have found that for tree growth April, May, June rainfall in Anatolia is more important than anything else. You can take a year with much more than average rainfall, where it was low in April, May, June and the trees will look like hell. They have very tiny rings. So that those three months which of course is the time when you’re really getting your harvest going are crucial. So there seems to be a link between good harvests and good tree rings. That’s one thought. The other thing is that I am struck by the discordance between what Mr. Woldring’s record shows and what I have. I am looking at the amount of juniper versus the amount of oak. I have 39,000 samples of wood, burned wood from Anatolia, going back to the Neolithic. And I would say that in the periods where his big spikes are, from 6610 BP and earlier,1 on our sites on average we find that 1 % of the carbonised wood is oak. And 90 % is juniper. And if you look at the graph that the palynologists show us, there doesn’t seem to be much juniper at all, it may just mean that oak is more prolific in producing pollen than juniper is. I was struck by somehow the inverse relationship between what you do and what I do. And I am not sure what that means.
Eleni Asouti: Just a comment on what you just said about the relationship between oak and juniper. I understand that samples for dendrochronology may give you some estimate of the presence of things but they cannot give you actually an estimate of the abundance of things. And my research on wood charcoals – I can’t remember right now, but I have dealt with tens of thousands of fragments – has shown a pattern that would concur with what Henk is showing there rather than the opposite. And actually it seems that juniper comes much more to the forefront later, in later periods, say the Early Chalcolithic onwards, at least from the evidence we have from the Konya Plain. I would like a comment from Catherine on the fact that, when you have pollen diagrams and you try to correlate them with evidence on geomorphological change and hydrological change, you always have to keep in mind, in Anatolia especially, that we have a whole range of tree species that are insect pollinators and they don’t show up in the pollen diagrams. I’ve looked at material from Pinarbasi A. Unfortunately the material was severely affected by all sorts of taphonomic biases. But at least from the presence of taxa, there was a whole range of taxa in there at a date which is actually much earlier than any other site we have from Central Anatolia. That included almonds, prunus, pistachio, and basically it gave me the impression that we are certainly dealing there with some form of woodland that wouldn’t actually show up in a pollen diagram from the same location or any other location. And in that case I refer particularly to the Akgöl core. And also the Akgöl core itself lacks any evidence whatsoever for the critical period that corresponds to the onset of the Neolithic habitation in Çatalhöyük, because for that particular part of the sequence, both in the core that was published in 1984 and the new one that was taken by Neil Roberts, there was no sediment, no pollen, nothing. So we don’t really know. The main thing I wanted to stress is the case of the insect-pollinated species that do not show up in the pollen diagrams.
Henk Woldring: Yes, Prunus and the Malus species have very poor preservation so in certain samples you wouldn’t find any of these species. So they don’t need to disperse the pollen because of the pollinating system.
Catherine Kuzucuoglu: At the onset of the Holocene and during the early Holocene, the start of the forest seems to appear with a delay. Comparison between pollen and other proxies in sediments such as isotopes, mineralogy or diatoms etc., points to the existence of such a delay between the AP–NAP ratio and the reality of tree spread. This delay is thought to be due to the weak pollen production and preservation of some tree species. I would also just make a comment about what Prof. Kuniholm said about tree remains in archaeological settlements. In the Konya Plain, all summer village houses (yayla) have roofs built using juniper trunks collected some 100 or 50 years ago in the Taurus Mountains 60 to 100km to the south. Destroy these houses and you will have a concentration of juniper wood remains without having had any juniper in an area 100km wide around the site. We know that, in the last 100 years at least, juniper never grew in the vicinity of these yayla’s, but all yayla roofs have been built using juniper. In the early Holocene also, people may have had similar practices, collecting plants, seeds or wood for specific purposes over of a very large territory. A discrepancy between pollen in lacustrine sediments and pollen/seed/wood in settlements is not contradictory for me, as far as landscape interpretation from pollen is concerned.
Geoffrey Summers (chairman): Catherine, you are going to comment on the Kizilirmak boundary.
Catherine Kuzucuoglu: The Kizilirmak boundary is only a water divide boundary used for defining the northern limit of the CANeW region. It is not a topographic barrier; on the contrary, the valley gives access to northern territories, that is the Pontus Mountains and the Black Sea region.