Debate
HOMOGENEITY VERSUS DIVERSITY: DYNAMICS OF THE CENTRAL ANATOLIAN NEOLITHIC
Roger MATTHEWS 
roger.matthews@ucl.ac.uk
Frédéric Gérard: I would like to congratulate Roger for this very enthusiastic talk, exactly in the spirit of CANeW, giving new ideas, exploring the possibilities and arousing the debate. My question concerns the differences between Çatalhöyük and Asikli, on which I will come back in my own talk. As for Çatal, you highlight the symbolic aspects in its society as possible means of strengthening the social system, all the social links. You said that there is a strong materialisation of the social relations. We cannot find this in Asikli. You stressed the fact that the difference may have been due to chronology, Asikli being earlier than Çatal. But don’t you think that the variation between Asikli and Çatal is due to two different evolutions? In Çatal, people needed to strengthen the social links because they were in a much more complex and much more heterogeneous society, while Asikli people were much more conservative. What is your opinion on this?
Roger Matthews: Well, it’s possible. I mean, when it comes to conservatism, I think, in its own way Çatal is as conservative as Asikli. Although it might be in a more symbolically rich way, at least as we have it now in the archaeological record, so that I wouldn’t say myself that necessarily Asikli represents a more conservative tradition than Çatalhöyük. Otherwise, I think it is very difficult to say actually.
Frédéric Gérard: When I said more conservative, I meant to point out that, unlike Çatal, Asikli knew no big changes in its sequence. In Çatal, after Levels VIA–V there is a total change in all the cultural aspects.
Hijlke Buitenhuis: We shouldn’t forget that if you look at architectural development in Çatal you have a number of different levels where we know the architecture. But in Asikli we actually only have these upper two building phases, apart of course from the deep sounding evidence in squares 4G–H, which extends the sequence downwards. We have the large layout which is actually almost one building phase (layer 2A), and then we have the southwestern corner with this special building, which might be even a little bit younger (layers 2A–1). There are clear differences in the subsistence patterns of these two building phases, as I could observe when I re-examined the bone material. It is in the southwest area that cattle becomes much more important quantitatively than in any of the previous layers, amounting to at least 14 % compared to 4–8 % in the deep sounding sequence. Apart from this material from the top levels, our knowledge of the Asikli animal remains is based on the bone material collected from the deep sounding. This material is stemming roughly from, say, dump levels. So actually, when you are talking about the architectural phases or architectural image of Asikli, you are talking about an almost one-period site and not about a development. One thing that we have to take into account is that this slight change in the bone material of Asikli’s latest building phase could already indicate a trend towards a more symbolically meaningful architecture, which then continued later on at Musular –cattle representing 40–50 % of the total bone material there – provided that we accept a special function for the Musular site, of course.
Roger Matthews: I certainly take that point. Nevertheless, the evidence from the deep sounding at Asikli does show at least some degree of continuity and repetition and consistency architecturally.
Nur Balkan-Atli: Just a small question. Are the levels at Çatal below Levels VI and VII rich also in symbolic objects?
Roger Matthews: As far as I know they are not so rich. And certainly as regards the wall paintings they are richer in the upper levels. I am not so sure about the distribution of symbolic objects in the lower levels. I don’t know if somebody else can address that point. Craig? Symbolic objects in the lower levels?
Craig Cessford: The change in the wall paintings has mainly to do with hunting and figural scenes that are post-Level VI. There are wall paintings earlier than that, but I don’t think we have the same types in the earlier levels. There are certainly still objects that you can consider symbolic in the earlier deposits. You don’t have the figurines, you don’t have the large flint blades, but there is probably a different range of objects that you are still getting: big pieces of obsidian, nice elements in the worked-bone assemblage, things like that. So, I think you still have symbolic artefacts. There are changes as well that perhaps parallel Asikli in that we do have party walls in the earlier levels, in Levels XII to may be X or XI. We also do have the same red plaster floors there. So in terms of thinking this is a temporal change, there are quite possibly strong parallels between Asikli and the basal levels of Çatal. Unfortunately, like Asikli, our early levels are only based on midden deposits. But there do seem to be quite strong parallels there.
Bleda Düring: I’m just wondering why you use the word ‘ideology’ to describe the function of all kinds of paintings and objects, because then my association is empires, kings, that kind of thing. And my idea of Çatalhöyük is more of an egalitarian society. Maybe with incipient elites trying to gain their position these objects could have functioned in their strategies, but the word ‘ideology’ wouldn’t come to my mind and did you mean it in that way? Or do you think it is a stratified society?
Roger Matthews: Well, I guess I am using the word ‘ideology’ without the associations that you have with it. And I think that’s fair enough, I mean, egalitarianism itself is an ideology. And so is, as you say, newly emerging elites. Whether or not they are there, I don’t know, but that is also scope for an ideology. I am using ideology in an extremely broad sense, to mean the way that people think about how they act out their social discourse. And that’s extremely broad and applies, I think, to pretty much every social condition.
Laurens Thissen: I was struck by what you mentioned about the multi-sourced aspect of ideology in Çatal. You also talked about lineages. With the perspective you sketched, and also referring back to the question of the origins of Çatalhöyük, could we combine these facets and talk about a multi-sourced origin of the people of Çatalhöyük, so of having mixed origins?
Roger Matthews: Well it’s possible, and clearly a range of substances are coming to Çatalhöyük and are being exploited by the people of Çatalhöyük, which necessitates them travelling and interacting with quite a wide geographical span. So there is clearly a range of influences at play. Although at the moment, of course, we can’t delineate them particularly clearly. As to the multiplicity of origin for people at Çatal, I really don’t know. And I don’t really see a convincing way of getting at that, particularly with the available evidence that we have.
Laurens Thissen: I was also struck by the abstract by Isabella Caneva who was talking about a melting pot (‘Demonstrations of group identity develop particularly when highly mixed peoples are concentrated in a restricted space – the emblematic ‘melting pot’, in which people never actually melt’ – Caneva, CANeW Abstract). Perhaps we can relate this to Çatalhöyük, provided that indeed the founding of Çatal was made by a mixed constellation of people, coming from diverse regions. I am not talking about extra-regional areas, but about the surroundings. Mellaart also mentioned these things, referring to the Taurus foothills or even to the Antalya region with Öküzini. Perhaps there was even some influence from Asikli, as Craig just mentioned some material culture contacts. Would it be possible to propose a mixed constellation as having been responsible for the founding of Çatalhöyük East? And further there is this contrast or ‘conflict’ with an obviously quite homogeneous architectural aspect.
Isabella Caneva: I don’t think that Çatalhöyük shows any sign of mixtures. I think it’s so homogeneous in its development, so isolated from any other thing. What I was mentioning in my abstract was the difference between Mersin and Çatalhöyük, which are two contemporary realities, quite close to each other, and certainly in contact with each other. Although both sites used the same obsidian, they were very different, probably very different on purpose.
Laurens Thissen: Is it possible to have homogeneity in material culture or in the settlement, while at the same time having a mixed constellation of people? This is the general question. Perhaps we could discuss this. It is quite interesting and perhaps relevant, not only for Çatal, but also for the contrasting image which Roger sketched for Asikli. Are there any comments on this?
Eleni Asouti: Can I just say something on the subject of what some people have already remarked upon, the marked continuity and stability in Çatalhöyük. That may as well be a fact, although it would take me ages to explain how and why and whatever. But about the homogeneity in particular, I mean, I am not in a position right now to get into any details about the latest results of the excavations of the earliest levels in Çatalhöyük, and it is in any case a very restricted area. But it does show things that are not similar with what you find in the later levels. My point for saying this right now is that when we are referring to Çatalhöyük, most of the times we have a pretty fixed idea and picture in our minds from Mellaart’s excavations. So, it would be perhaps preferable to keep in mind and to try to bring into the discussion elements that have come through from the recent excavations. Much of this picture of homogeneity that we are all accustomed with – based on Mellaart’s excavations – might actually be far from being completely real or corresponding to the latest data.
Damien Bischoff: I agree with Eleni – Mellaart worked at a macro scale and nowadays they are working at the micro scale – but, referring back to what was said about ideology – if we want to understand something about social structures at Çatalhöyük, and to reach a wider point of view, we can’t make an artificial division between the material facts and the mental world of these people. While assuming that people at Çatal were already fully engaged in agriculture, that they were pure farmers (which I don’t decide, but is for Eleni and her colleagues to say), at the same time you pointed to the archaising character of the hunting scenes. Talking about origins, first of all we have to try to answer why Çatal society was representing such a mental world and why, simultaneously, it was materialistic speaking living in another way. Maybe with privileged hunting? Do you believe that Çatal people were farmers, that is, having a farmers’ mental worldview? Or did they still have a hunter-gatherers’ mental worldview? Or that, if they were farmers, they could mentally have been from another age, preserving the old concepts? Something seems still not forgotten in Çatalhöyük. And it is the reason why Çatalhöyük is unique in one sense. I don’t want to enter the discussion on ethnicity. With such things, we don’t know too much. But if we take the symbolic track – and the archaeological evidence for that is quite rich for Çatalhöyük – we can link that with the Palaeolithic, with other logics and with Southeast Anatolia – it has something to do with Southeast Anatolia, although not because it is directly linked to that area. What do you think? Were Çatal people hunter-gatherers, are they farmers? Could they still possess this ‘old’ background, an old background preserved genetically and spiritually, and actualised at each second of the life of these people because man is man? And because the relationship between man and environment will always be kept in mind? You know what I mean?
Roger Matthews: Yes, I see what you mean. I think we have to be very careful in assuming that the wall paintings showing apparently wild or perhaps not so wild animals are an archaising tendency. I know I used that phrase myself in the e-discussion, perhaps because I was making the parallel with Assyrian lion hunting. You know that, shifting it in another direction, it is perfectly possible to have an interaction with animals that are perhaps essentially wild, perhaps partly wild, partly domesticated, which is not archaising and which is very much a generative part of social change. And it is not a question of harking back to a time when these people were hunter-gatherers, perhaps 700 years earlier or whatever. They still are hunting. And they still are interacting at all sorts of levels with wild animals and with animals that represent a whole spectrum of stages between fully wild and fully domesticated. So, I myself wouldn’t be keen on the idea of that kind of harking back to a golden age of the noble savage, even in the Neolithic. I think it’s more forward-looking than that and more rooted in the present.
Damien Bischoff: I understand, but I didn’t speak about any golden age. We all know that at the end of the Younger Dryas we have a general psycho-cultural development in the Near East and we see the spread of farming. Following Jean Perrot, we can distinguish a ‘neolithization phase’ with cosmogony, and an ‘achieved Neolithic phase’ with true agriculture. I really think that in between we have a continuity, a mental continuity. As I said in my abstract and will develop it tomorrow in my lecture, from a symbolic viewpoint we have to take into account the cosmogonic world of the hunter-gatherer that occurred before and is still present, to understand what is happening in the farmer’s world. With agriculture, we have some other logics, which will superimpose themselves to the old logics. That hypothesis explains why they are making the platforms you mentioned and why they are burying people under those platforms, as it is a representation of a cosmic order. As told by Jean-Daniel Forest, there was here a material link – even if it is changing through time – between the communities of the living and the dead. There was a living relationship, something very tight, which goes together with a cosmogonic way of representing the world, a necessary genesis, as we can see it in Göbekli Tepe for instance. All of this could be a better way to understand the social structures, through the links to the cycle of life and death, as they include metamorphosis like those of honeycombs or butterflies. So, I wanted to ask you if you believe that the Neolithic can mainly be seen as a farming mental way of life, as Forest expressed in his articles?
Roger Matthews: I am not so convinced that there are these great continuities with the Palaeolithic. And when I was referring to Jean-Daniel Forest’s work I was specifically talking about his very, sort of, grounded and specific interpretations of the symbolism at Çatalhöyük. And I wasn’t necessarily buying into the whole string of this that he has propounded. And I would be very, very cautious about seeing any of these great continuities, given the huge gaps in our evidence that are either real gaps or just gaps in information with which we have work. I can’t say anything more than that actually.
Louise Martin: I just wanted to stress the predominantly domestic picture of the Çatalhöyük animals, which I think is maybe something that hasn’t come up till now. The evidence, which is as yet unpublished, will be presented in our paper. But these are people who are predominantly relying on domestic herds, sheep and goat, from the beginning. But it is interesting that when the relationships start to become more complex, that you do get this proliferation of art. But in my view there is no simple correlation between whether animals are domestic or wild, and whether they actually appear symbolically. I think it is much more complicated than that. And when you look at Nevali Çori and the kind of things which are represented – birds amongst other things – we have to consider a full range of why these things are being symbolised. Might just be worth referring to David Louis Williams’ work on the Çatalhöyük wall paintings, where he is proposing that they are results of shamanistic activities, pre-hunting, which is a very interesting suggestion.
Roger Matthews: That is a fair point. But, nevertheless, sheep and goat aren’t depicted on the wall paintings of Çatalhöyük. The animals they are eating the most are not depicted.
Bleda Düring: One more detail. The hunting scenes are all after Level VI at Çatalhöyük, if I’m correct. So, if we were to have a model of a collective memory of hunting remaining important at Çatalhöyük, why are the hunting scenes only appearing in the latter half of the occupation of the site? So I am not convinced either that the picture as Damien suggested is right.
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