Debate

PROPOSAL FOR A REGIONAL TERMINOLOGY FOR CENTRAL ANATOLIA

Mihriban ÖZBAŞARAN & Hijlke BUITENHUIS                                      
mozbasaran@tayproject.org / h.buitenhuis@arcbv.nl

Roger Matthews: I must admit I was slightly surprised by the time we’d got to this stage at the beginning of the Table Ronde that this kite I’d put out several months ago during the CANeW e-discussion was still flying in fact. And I think to some extent it is coming down to the ground with a bump, which I am quite glad to see. But I really applaud the effort you put in and the integrated and holistic way in which you approach this issue. I must admit I am a little bit anxious about that ECA I issue. Having what is essentially a cultural definition for something for which, as you say, we have no culture as it were, there’s an anomaly there that may be addressed with future fieldwork, or may be not. I really don’t know. And I think one of the key things I felt all along during the e-Workshop as well as now is the need for more information actually on all of these divisions. Which again is going to get addressed as time goes by. Staying on the ECA I issue, what I had been calling ECA I, as you know, actually covers several periods elsewhere. That again is a debatable issue.

Hijlke Buitenhuis: Well, you are completely correct on the cultural definition for an ECA I period that we don’t actually know. But if you extend ECA I from the Younger Dryas up to and including the beginnings at Pinarbasi A and basal Asikli Höyük, we still would have an unexplained, so far empty stretch of time at the beginning of that period. And when, by the time of ECA II, with Pinarbasi A, Asikli and Kaletepe, we do get things, we have a developed system. The problem is then how to explain a developed system just suddenly coming up? And in addition it is very clear from Catherine’s and Henk’s talks also, that during this ECA I timeframe we have clear developments as far as climate, vegetation, fauna, ecology are concerned. And I cannot imagine that people are not being opportunistic in this period and not using these changes to their advantage. So putting in an ECA I period means basically leaving the options open. Furthermore, your comment on the need of data to fill in the schedule, that’s completely true.

Marcel Otte: I would like to make a general comment on the use of such clear-cut boundaries, which are in fact periods, stages in time, instead of units of cultural evolution. And as far as I understand archaeology and history in general, we are relying on what has been done by man and not by nature, nor by dates. We are interested in human behaviour and human evolution. I don’t think it is meaningful to have such clear-cut divisions all across Anatolia, which is anyway a huge country. What we are looking for, what we are interested in, are precisely the differences across these boundaries. We don’t care about dates, we care about the human spirit, about human manifestations. And of course, at the same time, or even on the same site you don’t have the same behaviour at the same time. We are not using the framework as determining what is happening in the frame.

Hijlke Buitenhuis: You are completely right. But basically our chart is a compilation of the data we have up till now, and a very rough schedule of that. It’s just putting the things together to see where the changes might be. And it is very clear that we need to fill this in. But our effort is also a plea for using a convenient and flexible terminology, consistent for Central Anatolia. If we don’t use the same terminology, if we keep on using terms such as ‘Aceramic’, ‘PPNB’, ‘PPNA’, ‘Neolithic’, ‘Late Neolithic’ and ‘Early Chalcolithic’, we would get very mixed up and confused, because as far as Central Anatolia is concerned, nobody really has fixed these labels for this area. So that was the reason just to say, look, can we now get to the stage where we start using the same kind of terminology at least? Away from the previous conceptions about what ‘Neolithic’ is, what ‘Chalcolithic’ is and what ‘Palaeolithic’ is.

Geoffrey Summers (chairman): Perhaps I could ask Professor Özdogan to make his comment. And Mehmet of course works outside Central Anatolia. Perhaps he might also address the issue of how people working in the Southeast and way over to the West might view our Central Anatolian scheme.

Mehmet Özdogan: In the Near East, where hundreds of sites have been excavated, there have been many attempts to change and recategorise the names to the degree that different labels overrun us. Even the terminology suggested by Robert Braidwood with his ‘incipient village farming’ stage, etc. never really worked. And then, our colleague Olivier Aurenche came up with a sixteen-division periodisation for hundreds of sites. Apart from him, I think, it is never used. In an area like Central Anatolia where periods are defined by only a few sites as in the scheme proposed by Hijlke and Mihriban, I think we will add only confusion to the already existing confusion and not solve any confusions. The most essential thing is this: do we really need to introduce one more name or terminology, or should we try to revise and redefine the already existing terminologies according to what we know and how things are developing?

Eliot Braun: I would suggest that, if you hold on to a very flexible framework, then you’ll be able to fill all the gaps when you start to identify things. And you’ll see that you have a lot more regionalism and you’ll need to be able to put it into some kind of a framework that people can reference easily.

Harald Hauptmann: I only wanted to stress on what Mehmet has said that a system should fit in a general system of named regions. I think this is one of the problems we all face in the Aegean area, or in the Eastern Anatolian or Central Anatolian areas. I think it’s better to term in the old fashioned way: say, when you speak about Halafian culture or Ubaidian culture, you know what it means. A system as proposed by Hijlke and Mihriban would work like that of Aurenche (ASPRO, Lyon), and nobody would understand it from outside.

Janusz Kozlowski: I think that the system that has been presented here is mostly about periodisation. But for me it is interesting what happened along your chronological cuts, along the divisions. And when you compare the work on the Neolithic in the Near East and in Europe, you observe that in Europe, within periods like ‘Early Neolithic’, or ‘Middle Neolithic’, you have different taxonomic units. And my question is whether or not these Central Anatolian units are really very homogeneous for this large area. And where are the limits of these Central Anatolian taxonomic units? What is their relation with Western Anatolia and Southeast Anatolia?

Mihriban Özbasaran: In order to make comparisons between the western and the eastern regions, I think we need to have a framework first of all. I fully agree with Marcel Otte and you that those divisions as shown on our scheme are just artificial. But that’s what we have in hand for the time being. We have data from single sites and then some radiocarbon dates. But we need to have a general framework. It was also one of the aims of this workshop to have a general outline, and then to make some comparisons, and define the phases. For example, I personally do not believe that there is a major cultural change yet known from the Aceramic Neolithic to the Middle Chalcholithic. I would personally never divide this span of time into ‘Early Pottery’, or ‘Late Pottery’, or ‘Early Chalcolithic’. But of course you are right that the whole scheme seems as a periodisation. The breaks are artificial, but I think that’s the method to start with.

Hijlke Buitenhuis: The title of our paper is a regional terminology for Central Anatolia only with stress on regional. And coming back to Hauptmann’s remarks on the Halaf or Ubaid even within these kind of cultural units, we have distinctions like Early Halaf, Late Halaf, etc. And actually, for Central Anatolia, until ten years ago we didn’t really have any culture, any Neolithic culture. So we could say that the term ECA, meaning Early Central Anatolian, could be parallel to Halaf.

Geoffrey Summers: Could I perhaps ask our next panellist Laurens Thissen to comment on, to comment perhaps bearing in mind what he was saying in his presentation this morning about regionalism within Central Anatolia.

Laurens Thissen: I must confess I am feeling very ill at ease with this present discussion. I was – together with Roger in the e-mail discussion – quite enthusiastic in the beginning in finding some workable thing for this huge timespan we are dealing with. I still think that ‘ECA’ as a label – if indeed the region, can be defined in the archaeological sense – is a useful thing, comparable to Marc Lebeau’s ‘Early Jezirah’ for Northern Syrian Early Bronze Age. But when I see now the restructuring of the division as made by Mihriban and Hijlke, I feel that things are beginning to start their own life. I mean, ECA I to V is now already conceived as a kind of stable thing, to be re-devised and to be subdivided at will when data are being fed into it. We see now, for instance, that ECA II becomes ECA IIIA, ECA III becomes ECA IIIB, etc., etc. So, from my initial enthusiasm, I must confess indeed that I think this is leading not anywhere. And referring back to my talk this morning, although I know also that what I tried to suggest concerning regionalism, or a split between the Konya Plain and Cappadocia is perhaps only a step for beginning something, it is perhaps even better to conceive Central Anatolia as a basic unit and to conceive periodisation as a flow of time, and to put attention to where things really started to change within the societies. I would suggest using the segments in between the changes, to use these as kind of labels, but descriptive labels like for instance ‘early Holocene stability phase’ and not very reified labels.

Nur Balkan-Atli: I think we really need this framework as proposed by Hijlke and Mihriban, and to work with it as a tool. We can discuss it, we can evaluate it, maybe we can change it in the future, but we cannot destroy it, because for the moment, for the people working in Central Anatolia, it is not possible to go on like this.

Douglas Baird: I think these systems are tools as Nur has said. And the evaluation of any tool should be what use it is to us. And what I’d like to see is a clear statement, if one is going to adopt systems like this, of what extra value they give us over whatever systems have been used before. One of the things that I haven’t seen, perhaps because I missed out on the early stages of the e-mail discussions and so on, is a clear statement of purposes behind the creation of this new system. If it’s to be some sort of chronological guide, why is it better than simply using absolute terms like, early 8th millennium BC, late 8th millennium BC, or the like. It seems, some of the problems of this system involve a conflation, a convergence of purposes, trying to combine chronology and cultural units. Why not keep them separate? And devise different systems for different purposes for example? But if we are going to devise systems we need to understand very clearly at the beginning why we are doing it.

Nikos Efstratiou: I have a small comment on what I see as a schizophrenia complex or syndrome. We pass our archaeological life defining types, going into details and then, when the time comes to paint the whole picture, the big picture, then we object to what we have done till now. So if we decide to follow another way of reconstructing past life, we have to make our self-criticism. And then be more honest to ourselves.

Didier Binder: I just want to point one idea. These categories are created to be used, and to be used for their heuristic value, I think. My questions are very simple old questions. How did the Neolithic paradigm develop in this region? What is ‘Neolithic’ in the ECA I period, and what is not? Are there differences between the Neolithic and the Chalcolithic paradigms? And I am not so sure that concepts like Central Anatolian I, II, III, IV, etc., are very useful for working at these general questions. We are not sure that the social dimensions, the cultural dimensions, are limited to this region, Central Anatolia. And maybe what we have here is the connection between different social areas, I mean in the cultural sense. So, as Nur pointed out previously, I think it is very useful to discuss if there is a real difference between the Late Neolithic and Early Chalcolithic. But for the moment, we have only one settlement, for one stretch of time. And I think the situation is very complex, especially in this stretch of time where the situation is more difficult to understand. We have to be aware that we can find different societies with different levels of development in each substage.

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