Not Seeing Is Believing: Ritual Practice and Architecture at Chalcolithic Çadır Höyük in Anatolia

Abstract

Chalcolithic religious practice at the site of Çadır Höyük (central Anatolia) included the insertion of ritual deposits into the architectural fabric of the settlement, “consecrating” spaces or imbuing them with symbolic properties. These deposits are recognizable in the archaeological record by their consistent use of ritually-charged material, such as ochre, copper, human and animal bone, and certain kinds of ceramics. During the 800-year period considered in this paper, the material practice of making these ritual deposits remained remarkably consistent. However, the types of spaces where the deposits are made change as shifting social organization reforms the divisions between private and public space.

Social complexity and core-periphery relationships in an Andean Formative ceremonial centre: domestic occupation at Chavín de Huántar

“…The Formative period in the Central Andes offers a similar picture. Such developments are not limited to the Americas; monumental architecture developed dramatically among Chalcolithic societies in the Near East between 6500 and 5550 BC (Hackley et al 2021), for example, requiring specialists with the necessary skills to meet the needs of corporate construction projects. Understanding the relationship between artisans and elites is crucial for comprehending the power relations that existed between ceremonial centres and their immediate peripheries and for recognising the strategies that authorities used to entice artisans to work for religious organisations.…”

The Culture-Related Development of Architecture in the Neolithic Period

“…Possibly, some of them had two stories where the lower floors served as food storage and the upper ones for living purposes (Hackley et al, 2021).…”

Smelting Metals, Enacting Rituals. The Interplay of Religious Symbolisms and Metallurgical Practices in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean

“…Religious and ritual ideologies are complex and dynamic, constantly evolving in connection to changes in the contemporary sociopolitical and cultural milieus. When looking, for instance, at the gradual and non-linear processes of increasing social complexity and economic diversification that characterized the ancient Near East throughout the Chalcolithic period, important shifts in ritual foci (from communal to private, central to dispersed, architectural-based to object-based) become evident at various scales (Hackley, Yıldırım and Steadman 2021). Subsequently, the alternating cycles of political centralization and social competition observed from the first spread of urbanism in the 4th millennium BC, through the rise of city-states and regional states in the Early Bronze Age (hereafter EBA), to the establishment of complex, supra-regional political entities during the Middle and Late Bronze Age (hereafter MBA and LBA) triggered crucial changes in the ways cosmogonies, mythological traditions, and ritual practices were used to regulate status, mitigate conflict, and invest natural and anthropogenic landscapes with new meanings (Kristiansen and Larsson 2005).…”