Introduction
INTRODUCTION TO THE CANeW PROJECT 
Frédéric GERARD & Laurens THISSEN
IFEA, Nuru Ziya Sok n° 22, PK 54, 80072 Beyoglu, Istanbul, TR. CNRS-UMR 7041 ArScAn, Maison de l'Archéologie et de l'Ethnologie, Nanterre, FR. / Independent researcher, Amsterdam, NL.
frederic.gerard@isbank.net.tr
Archaeological research in Central Anatolia started seriously in the 1950s with James Mellaart from the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara (BIAA), who surveyed large stretches of the Konya and Karaman Plains. Also the Lakes Region ('Göller Bölgesi') to the west of the Konya Region was widely covered by Mellaart. These surveys led to the discovery of many sites - which he already rightly classified as Neolithic and Chalcolithic which were foremost Hacilar in the Burdur area and Çatalhöyük near Konya. Meanwhile David French started surveys in the Karaman Plain, finding equally promising sites there.
Beginning in the late 1950s, and running through the better part of the 1960s, the survey results were tested by the major excavations carried out by Mellaart at Hacilar and Çatalhöyük East and West, as well as by French at two mounds around the village of Canhasan. Mellaart's and French's ideas about the importance and ancestry of the general region of Central Anatolia were to be fully confirmed by their projects, yielding the first glimpses of the existence of a powerful Aceramic Neolithic society in Turkey away from the Fertile Crescent. At the same time, in order to get a full overview of prehistoric settlement distribution for Central Anatolia, Ian Todd carried out a major survey project in the area, the published results of which are still unsurpassed in their analytic and perceptive power after more than two decades.
Unfortunately, at the time, these fascinating prospects were not immediately worked out as consistently as one could have wished. As a major interfering factor counts the necessity for many Turkish and foreign archaeologists to cope with the rescue excavations in the Keban and later Atatürk Dam areas in the Euphrates. In Central Anatolia it was actually only Jacques Bordaz, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who continued the lines of research set out by the BIAA projects by exploring the Beysehir-Sugla Lakes area, carrying out excavations at the sites of Suberde and Erbaba, and finding villages of the Aceramic Neolithic as well as of the Pottery Neolithic, both relatable to the evidence from the Konya Plain.
In the late 1980s, the Cappadocian program of research led by Ufuk Esin from Istanbul University initiated a new elan in Central Anatolian archaeological exploration, starting excavations at the major Aceramic site of Asikli Höyük. The dig opened up the prehistory of the Cappadocian area, giving astounding evidence of a consecutive series of Aceramic villages over a period of perhaps a thousand years. Complementary investigations soon followed, such as the Central Anatolian obsidian project, being a French-Turkish co-operative enterprise headed by Nur Balkan-Atli from the Prehistory Department of the Istanbul University and Marie-Claire Cauvin and Didier Binder from the CNRS, France; the excavations at Musular very close to Asikli carried out by Mihriban Özbasaran; those at Güvercinkayasi led by Sevil Gülçur and a new program of excavations at Tepecik-Çiftlik by Erhan Biçakçi, all members of the Prehistoric Section of Istanbul University. The sites mentioned are beginning to yield fascinating insights in the diversity of settlement patterns, locations and material culture over a period running from the 9th up to the beginning of the 5th millennium cal BC.
In the meantime, in the western part of Central Anatolia, in the Konya area, Mellaart's work was finally followed up by the renewed excavations at Çatalhöyük through a large-scale project led by Ian Hodder. Simultaneously, Douglas Baird carried out surveys in the Konya area leading to the discovery of (Epi-)Palaeolithic, Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites. Complementary to the Çatalhöyük project, test excavations by Trevor Watkins from Edinburgh University were made at several locales collectively named as Pinarbasi. All this work is continuing.
With the accumulation of new data since the early 1990s we can now begin to make some general statements and inferences, and to put up hypotheses about Central Anatolian societies between the 9th and 6th millennia cal BC.
The CANeW Project
It was a mildly hot Sunday in June 2000, on a quiet bus trip from Istanbul to the dig at Asagi Pinar in Turkish Thrace that the undersigned and Günes Duru, while casually glancing at the monotonous landscape outside, decided on a project involving the Central Anatolian Neolithic period. The Central Anatolian Neolithic e-Workshop - CANeW - started out in November 2000 as a small discussion group of American, British, Dutch, French, Italian and Turkish scholars making use of internet. The reason that it was Central Anatolia which was selected was simply due to the research interests of the organisers - Frédéric Gérard and Laurens Thissen, with the collaboration of Damien Bischoff - and to the fact that an impressive amount of new data was beginning to accumulate, allowing a potentially fruitful exchange of ideas that could pave the way towards a new understanding of the prehistoric developments in this region. The selected timespan, the 9th to 6th millennia cal BC, was taken to make the scope big enough for tackling the dynamics of long-term processes and to cover many of the crucial shifts in Anatolian prehistory, including matters of neolithisation, the emergence of Aceramic villages such as Asikli Höyük, the extensive occupation at Çatalhöyük, and the transformations towards a Middle Chalcolithic stage in the 6th millennium BC.
The discussion group consisted of 12 persons who were selected because of their expertise of the area and period (Apart from the undersigned, these included Nur Balkan-Atli, Didier Binder, Hijlke Buitenhuis, Isabella Caneva, Peter Ian Kuniholm, Catherine Kuzucuoglu, Roger Matthews, Maryanne Newton, Mihriban Özbasaran and Mehmet Özdogan.). The discussions lasted from January till June 2001 and were fed by some specific topics, each meant to be debated for a specified amount of time before going over to a new set of questions to be addressed. The spirit of the e-mail discussions aimed at exchanging ideas on general issues and a pooling of existing knowledge on the area, rather than being a forum for specialist studies. We aimed at the big picture of coming to grips with the definition and evolution of Central Anatolian societies rather than going for the close-up.
Parallel to the e-mail discussions, a flexible website was created that could be adapted and modified at will and permanently (first web address at : www.chez.com/canew/index.htm), and which was to be used as an interface between the members of the project and scholars interested in the general subject of the Central Anatolian Neolithic. Internet technology was used throughout to strengthen the generalist approach. For instance, the 14C charts and the geoarchaeological and geomorphological maps that we created stressed the general framework, and they will continue to be adapted and updated whenever new information becomes available. The format of a closed discussion group finally guaranteed the preservation of the information supplied by the participants.
While this closed discussion was going on, care was taken to keep the website open to the whole community of people interested in archaeology. Over the year, the website was fed by the preliminary results of the project in the form of syntheses of the discussions on the various issues addressed, including geoarchaeological maps with site distributions and comments, a sites database, 14C databases and 14C charts. While many facets of the Central Anatolian Neolithic electronic Workshop were successful, as can be seen on the website, we have to admit that the possibilities of the new ways of communication perhaps at this stage were not exhausted to the full. The degree and intensiveness of debate, while high in the first months of the project, dropped to a low level later on when participation was gradually slacking down (cf. Table). It was perhaps felt by some of the participants that scientific discussion was not compatible with the alleged elusive, fast and immediate medium of e-mail.
The special format of the Table Ronde, the purpose of which was to present the results of the e-discussion and to give rise to open debates among the international community of researchers, was simply a continuation of the closed discussion group, but then brought into the open - open for everybody to pool ideas and expertise, and ultimately to assess the old and new evidence brought forward for the region. In addition to the original e-mail participants, several researchers were invited to talk also during the Table Ronde, to note Craig Cessford, Henk Woldring, Geoffrey Summers, Douglas Baird, Clemens Lichter, Günes Duru, Eleni Asouti, Louise Martin, Bleda Düring, Damien Bischoff and Harald Hauptmann. The lectures were limited to 20 minutes, and emphasis was put on debate and discussion, which were scheduled to last for 40 minutes following each lecture. Everybody was invited to contribute to the discussions, in order to move forward in Central Anatolian Neolithics. To structure the discussions a special panel of flexible constellation served as an engine to the debate. The panel opened the discussion by making a first remark or comment, and to this the audience could react. After a specific period of time, a second panel member proceeded in the same way, etc.
Prior to the beginning of the Table Ronde, the program, a list of participants, and the abstracts of the lectures were published on the website. In addition, the CANeW site will contain the full presentation of the lectures, the ensuing debates and the replies by the authors, and an updating of the various databases is also planned to continue. Apart from putting the proceedings on the world-wide-web, open to everybody, our further aim was to publish the integral lectures, the discussions with the audience and the replies in traditional book form. All the lectures and debates were taped and immediately typed out. The discussions were subsequently edited, where we aimed at preserving as much as possible the natural flow of language. Prior to publication, the lecturers was given the possibility to respond to what had been brought forward in the general debate, and these replies are included here as well.
The Table Ronde took place 23-24 November 2001 and was attended by more than a hundred participants, about 50 of whom were Turkish scholars and students, the remainder coming from Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom and the USA. In particular, the young generation of British, Dutch, French, German, Italian and Turkish scholars was extensively represented, a fact which contributed greatly to the diversity and the liveliness of the discussions.
In practice, the objectives of the International Table Ronde were diverse and involved proposals for an absolute chronology for Central Anatolia, combining the available 14C dates and the dendrochronological data (Craig Cessford, Peter Ian Kuniholm and Maryanne Newton); implications of the geoarchaeological maps of Central Anatolia produced especially for the CANeW project by combining the physical, hydrological and geomorphological data with the distribution of archaeological sites on the 9000-5000 cal BC time range (Catherine Kuzucuoglu); methodologies for surveying in the region (Douglas Baird, Geoffrey Summers); possibilities for a convenient regional terminology for Central Anatolia (Mihriban Özbasaran and Hijlke Buitenhuis, Jean Perrot); new perspectives on human/environment relations in Neolithic societies (Eleni Asouti and Andrew Fairbairn, Louise Martin et al., Henk Woldring); hypotheses on the possible origins of the Neolithic phenomenon in the region (Didier Binder, Günes Duru); aspects of cultural homogeneity as well as transformations of the social system in Central Anatolia (Bleda Düring, Frédéric Gérard, Roger Matthews, Laurens Thissen); concepts of ethnicity (Isabella Caneva); evaluations of the extent and the degree of contact and/or cultural frontiers of Central Anatolia with neighbouring regions, i.e. Southeast Anatolia, the Northern Levant, Cilicia, the Lakes Region, the Aegean and Northwest Anatolia (Harald Hauptmann, Clemens Lichter, Mehmet Özdogan); and an attempt at explaining social representation through the use of symbolic repertoires of two major sites of the Anatolian Neolithic, Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük (Damien Bischoff).
As everybody agreed, the event was a great success because of the emphasis on open scientific debates. The choice of issues made these two days both intense and enthralling, with many of the participants expressing the desire to have such a type of meeting, organised along a tight formula of e-mail discussion, workshop, debates and replies, and focused on a regional problematic, become a regular scientific event. We, as organisers, contemplate to repeat the experience in the near future, covering pre-Bronze Age Southeast Anatolia, or better, 'Upper Mesopotamia' as it is now more appropriately called, or else exploring West and Northwest Anatolia in its relations to the Aegean, Thrace and the Pontic areas over a similar time frame.
Acknowledgements
The Table Ronde organisation was financially supported by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS-Paris, France) and the Institut Français d'Études Anatoliennes-Georges Dumézil (Istanbul, Turkey). In addition to this, the Malcolm and Carolyn Wiener Laboratory for Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology of Cornell University (Ithaca, New York), the Academy of Sciences and Humanities of Heidelberg (Germany), students of the Prehistory Department of Istanbul University (Thanks are due to Çiler Altinbilek, Merve Andaç, Gonca Baviker, Nurcan Kayacan, Serhan Mutlu, Turhan Öksüz, Deniz Uygun, Nazmi Ürey, Nurcan Yalman, Semra Yildirim and Seden Yüksel, who helped us with microphones, slide machines, tapings, the selling of books, posters and programs, luncheon vouchers and innumerable other things), our dear publishing house Ege Yayinlari (Istanbul), the tourism agency New Horizon (Istanbul), and the computer shop Kantura (Istanbul) supported us in one way or another in organising the event, and to all of these we owe our greatest thanks. In publishing this book, we are forever grateful to Ege Yayinlari and to the Institut Français d'Études Anatoliennes-Georges Dumézil.
A generous grant by the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara came at the right time, and the participation of the Malcolm and Carolyn Wiener Laboratory for Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology of Cornell University was again of great help. Special thanks go to Ahmet Boratav and Hülya Tokmak from Ege Yayinlari for their professionalism in supporting this independent project and for making possible that this volume could be published only six months after the event.
In particular we want to express our deep gratitude to Damien Bischoff, our creative Webmaster, good in social events, philosophical thoughts and many more things that you can not even imagine; further to Roger Matthews, the perfect gentleman-archaeologist, who was so kind as to offer us his qualities as a proofreader - without him, this book would not have been as readable as we hope it will be, where all remaining errors are of course our responsibility. A big word of thanks also to Peter Ian Kuniholm, friendly and very smart dendrochronological phenomenon, who generously supported the project and initiated a fruitful cooperation in the chronological field. A great debt we owe to Oguz Erdur, passionate cultural anthropologist, who did a great job in transcribing the not always perfectly tape-recorded phrases, and who was, in addition to that, not yet exhausted enough to provide us with a thought-provoking sociological evaluation of the CANeW event.
A final, deep and sincere word of thanks is due to all participants of the CANeW project, e-mail discussion and Table Ronde alike, who took the trouble to come to Istanbul in such great numbers, and who made this event the high-spirited and brain-storming experience it was.