Debate
TIME TRAJECTORIES FOR THE NEOLITHIC OF CENTRAL ANATOLIA
Laurens THISSEN 
Geoffrey Summers: Should I perhaps ask Professor Kuniholm to respond from the point of view of dendrochronology to what we’ve heard about 14C dates?
Peter Kuniholm: Depressing. It’s not the fault of the excavators so much. At Çatalhöyük, for example, there was a post 25cm in diameter which had 576 rings in it. And when they took the bag – we got the bag from MASCA – we realized that what they had done, they had taken a piece from the centre of this post and this is the famous, anomalous date which appears in all of Mellaart’s reports, 500 years too early. Maryanne (Newton) reconstructed that post for her masters thesis amongst other things, and found that we could get a perfectly reasonable set of dates. It was all one piece of wood but there were 42 little pieces and they just grabbed something from the middle without any appreciation. This was in the early days of radiocarbon. They ended up with a completely erroneous date, 500 years out. And what makes me wonder is – I look at these other sites. Any site that has one or two or three or four dates, if it’s on anything that has a long life, such as a tree, you have some very serious error possibilities.
Didier Binder: I have three points to comment. With these kinds of charts we have to clean the data. First of all you should delete data with standard deviations of more than one century, because it’s a source of noise. One thing about Bayesian statistic – I tried to make the sequence to the Asikli series, taking care of the boundaries. The computer collapsed… So… I have a questions for Laurens. One of the questions linked to what he exposed is that it does not give so much importance to mobility. I wonder if it is correct to discuss different territorial strategies in the Konya region and in Cappadocia if you don’t take into account aspects of mobility, especially because it is obvious that there are strong links between the Konya Plain and Cappadocia, beginning with obsidian procurements of course. So, there are social links, people are moving, and therefore you cannot have an independent view of the developments. Second point is that I think that Anatolian archaeology is focused on centres, on big settlements. We know nothing about the periphery, we know nothing about territorial logistics, we know nothing about rhythms of occupation or seasonal activities. So it is very difficult to give a general outline for this region and discuss palaeohistorical differences in developments if we do not take into account, first, mobility and second, territorial strategies.
Laurens Thissen: Let me just say a few things about the 14C charts first. Please don’t see these chronological charts as the ultimate proof – they are meant as tools only. Indeed, there are many uncertainties, as also Peter Kuniholm expressed, referring to sites having only one date, or three dates. The charts are a presentation of all the 14C dates available for this time span and for this area. And I wanted to keep them as objective as possible, including all the dates, even those with large standard deviations. So I didn’t want to make interpretations of reliability, apart from the fact that in drawing the timespans for the individual sites I gave their summed values based on the 1 sigma ranges. And if there were some additions to make, these are put in the comments going with the charts. I must stress that you cannot say, on the basis of this chart for instance, that Asikli Höyük is contemporary with Kaletepe, or Musular with Suberde, as the chart suggests. It may be possible on other grounds, but you cannot argue with the chart itself, saying, well here are the 14C dates, so there is the proof. The chart is not useful and was not meant to be treated as a clear statement of contemporaneity or non-contemporaneity of sites.
About Didier’s comment on mobility, in fact you suggest taking into account the contacts between west and the east, areas that in my story were perhaps a little bit too opposed to each other. Yes, that’s indeed right, I think – I was quite fixed on this opposition. I even rearranged the Central Anatolian 14C chart according to a Konya area and a Cappadocian area, and which is not on the web site. I was quite fascinated by these different rhythms and patterns, which I think have some validity at least as a point for discussion. Given the openness of the landscape of Central Anatolia as a whole, it is of course obvious that there must have been constant contacts, whether in obsidian exchange or trade (or whatever term you want to use), etc., but the fact remains that the time paths of Konya and Cappadocia were differently structured, and that might give clues as to deeper patterns of difference.
Didier Binder: It is also linked to mobility – the question of centre and periphery. And what do we know about the seasonal activities of these people?
Laurens Thissen: There is one instance I know of where you can talk indeed of two more or less contemporary settlements, which are Asikli, or better the top layers of Asikli, and Musular. Günes Duru will talk about this extensively so I will not talk about it now, but I can comment that there is a possibility to think about strategies of territoriality within these two sites. More so, there seems to be a connection between not only Asikli and Musular but also with Asikli and other sites in the direct surroundings. So there must be things going on – the use of special sites – in relation to the village of Asikli, which we can now start to investigate on the basis of excavated data.
Marcel Otte: You should stress, I think, the last hunter-gatherers and then the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and B, if it has still a meaning in Central Anatolia. I mean that you should make many categories inside your different red bars. It would help us to understand your chart, or the other charts. And the second point is about Öküzini that we have been excavating. There are many more 14C dates than given on the chart (Southwest and Aegean Anatolia, Northwest Anatolia). There is a much longer period covered by 14C for Öküzini.
Laurens Thissen: Thank you, Marcel. About Öküzini, you are right, there are many more dates. They are, however, much earlier than the framework CANeW set itself. About your comment on the red bars, as I said in answer to Didier, CANeW wanted to keep these charts as dry and as objective as possible. So, were we to put in labels like Mesolithic, PPNA or PPNB or whatever you want, the whole thing will not be flexible anymore. We would get the confusion of terminology, as stressed by Mihriban and Hijlke in their talk, and we definitely wanted to avoid that, even when risking the charts not to be immediately appreciable by the eye and the mind. But presented as the are, our charts remain flexible and open, where the labels themselves will change constantly anyway.
Marcel Otte: Everything is changing. Even the carbon dates.
Laurens Thissen: Well, no. The calibration curve may be changing, but the 14C dates themselves will not change.
Mehmet Ozdogan: Just looking at the general picture which has been presented in the morning and with these ongoing discussions, there is one thing that is clear from Central Anatolia, and that is that our knowledge is still poor, and for almost the whole time range we just have one site per date. And concerning Asikli and Musular I am not even sure whether they are two different sites. I think they are basically separated by a river, but that is another problem. So we have so little data with an enormous area. And from this huge region, for a period of more than 5000 years, we have so few excavated sites to be able to build up a picture. And I perfectly agree with Marcel Otte and also with what Didier has been saying, that our evidence is still not enough to separate it into regional differences I think. When we look at one site from one region and one site from another region, there seems to be a pattern. But with that slight evidence it is not really that crystal-clear whether they are kind of a merging type of differences or whether they are really territorial boundaries. And concerning what Craig has been saying, and also with Peter’s comments on the 14C dates, first we have too few sites, and then we have some basic question marks with the validity of 14C dates, and finally, as Marcel pointed out, not all the dates have been incorporated in the charts. For example, we know that there are some published dates from Asikli, but there are more: half of the dates have not been published. So, coming back to what Marcel has been saying, I think when we try to make such charts, we should also always include the cultural identity, or cultural characters so as to understand what these dates or what these horizons really mean. I think, as archaeologists we should not completely forget about their cultural characteristics. The traditional way of looking at culture is still valid. And if we go with the surface sites I think we have much more evidence then securely dated 14C dates. As a starting point these charts are all right, but we should really try to avoid dividing up Central Anatolia into portions, or to balkanise it. To divide it into a Konya Plain – we have no idea what is happening north of the Konya Plain. There is a huge area there that is now being explored by our Japanese colleagues, and they are finding sites north of the Nigde region which we know very little about.
Laurens Thissen: As I said, the charts do include all the available data for the timespan set by CANeW, which is 10,000 to 5000 cal BC, and for the regions concerned. Again I can say that this chart is not the truth, it is just the beginning. And you can of course do nothing when data like in the case of Asikli are left unpublished, even if we succeeded in including many data that are also still unpublished, but we could acquire thanks to the kindness of many colleagues, where I want to refer to: Gritille, Nevali Çori, Bademagaci, Mersin, Güvercinkayasi and Musular, not to forget the wonderful cooperation of the Cornell Dendrochronological Lab. About the segmentation of Konya and Cappadocia of Central Anatolia, I have to stress that also according to the geomorphologists’ information there is indeed a difference in regions, in the geomorphology.
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