Çatalhöyük: the leopard changes its spots. A summary of recent work

Abstract

This paper summarises and interprets data from the Neolithic site ot Çatalhöyük East collected between 2000 and 2008, while at the same time integrating data from earlier and more recent excavation seasons. The paper focuses on evidence for change during the occupation of the site, arguing for an increase in the size and density of occupation into the middle levels associated with symbolic and ritual elaboration within an aggressively egalitarian community. The middle ‘classic’ levels at Çatalhöyük were associated with increased workload, physical stresses and illness. The pressures were relieved in the upper levels after 6500 BC by shifts to greater mobility, increased economic independence of houses and dispersal of population. This shift in the upper levels may be of relevance to the spread of farming populations into northwestern Anatolia and Europe.

Network Analysis and Entanglement

“…Houses at Çatalhöyük are used for burial, food preparation and consumption, ritual, artifact production. Indeed it has been argued that at this time Beverything is brought into the house^ (Hodder 2006b), and there is much evidence for a house-based scale of economic production (Hodder 2014c). Clay use too was often organized at a house level, with some evidence of separate houses using their own mudbrick recipes.…”

“…It would have been difficult to Bgo back^to using obsidian flakes. Similarly, through time at Çatalhöyük the affordances of pottery become increasingly used (Hodder 2014c). Initially important as containers and for cooking, they later become used for storage and they came to take on important social roles and be richly decorated.…”

Socio-Material Archaeological Networks at Çatalhöyük a Community Detection Approach

“…Mudbrick buildings were densely packed in a close-knit fabric that did not allow for the presence of roads or significant open areas. As with other Neolithic megasites (e.g., Basta, Ba' ja, Aşiklı Höyük), Çatalhöyük's houses formed the center of domestic and ritual life and were characterized by a highly regular repetition of the same elements, while at the same time revealing smaller idiosyncrasies (in terms of size, layout, material culture) that resulted in each house being slightly different and independent, and having a specific identity (Asouti, 2006;Hodder, 2014a;Hodder and Farid, 2014). Despite being constructed very close to each other, houses at Çatalhöyük are, throughout the entire sequence, easy to distinguish spatially.…”

“…These independent rectilinear mudbrick walls usually delimit a central living area and smaller side rooms used for storage or food processing. Except for some houses in the early occupation of the site, the living area is typically divided into a northern sector where burials, wall paintings, installations and, in general, symbolic features were located, and a southern sector where fire installations (e.g., ovens and hearths) are located and food preparation and domestic activities took place (Hodder, 2005(Hodder, , 2013(Hodder, , 2014aHodder and Farid, 2014). Throughout the entire sequence, houses at the site are the focus of burial activity, symbolic elaboration, small-scale food processing, consumption and small-scale production activity (Bogaard et al, 2009;Bains et al, 2013;Carter and Milic, 2013;Demirergi et al, 2014).…”

“…The emergence of forms of permanent residence in population dense largescale settlements during the Neolithic period involved deep transformations of the hunter-gatherer ethos and way of life, so radical that it has been suggested that the process lead to essential cognitive transformations (see Benz and Bauer, 2013;Watkins, 2013;Sterelny and Watkins, 2015;Benz, 2017). Processes of group integration, of community construction and establishment of mechanisms of social regulation started very early in the Epipaleolithic and Early Neolithic (e.g., Kuijt, 2000;Kuijt and Goring-Morris, 2002;Hodder, 2005Hodder, , 2014aHodder, , 2018Belfer-Cohen, 2010, 2011;Belfer-Cohen and Goring-Morris, 2011Benz et al, , 2017Benz, 2016;Finlayson and Makarewicz, 2017), but it is in the PPNB, with the emergence of large clustered agglomerations (megasites), that such processes "scale-up" to an extent and an intensity that could be interpreted as "almost urban" (Mazzucato, 2016). Jordan is home to the earliest appearance of these settlement types, but others megasites emerged across the late Neolithic Near Eastern landscape and later in the Balkans (Rollefson, 2004(Rollefson, , 2010(Rollefson, , 2015Bogaard and Isaakidou, 2010;Chapman, 2010;Menotti and Korvin-Piotrovskiy, 2012;Chapman et al, 2014;Wengrow, 2015).…”