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This volume presents material artifacts recovered from the site in these seasons, including a range of clay-based objects (ceramics, clay balls, tokens, figurines) as well as those made of stone, shell and textile.
Veteran science writer Michael Balter skillfully weaves together many threads in this fascinating book about one of archaeology’s most legendary sites— Çatalhöyük. First excavated forty years ago, the site is justly revered by prehistorians, art historians, and New Age goddess worshippers alike for its spectacular finds dating almost 10,000 years ago. Archaeological maverick Ian Hodder, leader of the recent re-excavation at this Turkish mound, designated Balter as the project’s biographer. The result is a skillful telling of many stories about both past and present: of the inhabitants of Neolithic Çatalhöyük and the development of human creativity and ingenuity, as revealed in the recent excavation; of James Mellaart, the original excavator, whose troubles off the mound eventually overshadowed his incisive work at the site; of Hodder and his intense, brilliant crew who marveled and squabbled over the meaning of finds in dusty trenches while attempting to reintepret Mellaart’s work; and of the recent history of the theory and methods of archaeology itself. Part story of the human past, part soap opera of modern scholarly life, part textbook on the practice of modern archaeology, this book should appeal to general readers and archaeological students alike.
CD-ROM contains "supplementary material by members of the Çatalhöyük teams / edited by Ian Hodder"--Cd-ROM disc label.
This book presents an interdisciplinary study of the role of spirituality and religious ritual in the emergence of complex societies. Involving an eminent group of natural scientists, archaeologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and theologians, this volume examines Çatalhöyük as a case study. A nine-thousand-year old town in central Turkey, Çatalhöyük was first excavated in the 1960s and has since become integral to understanding the symbolic and ritual worlds of the early farmers and village-dwellers in the Middle East. It is thus an ideal location for exploring theories about the role of religion in early settled life. This book provides a unique overview of current debates concerning religion and its historical variations. Through exploration of themes including the integration of the spiritual and the material, the role of belief in religion, the cognitive bases for religion, and religion's social roles, this book situates the results from Çatalhöyük within a broader understanding of the Neolithic in the Middle East.
A unique collaboration between archaeologists and a range of specialists in ritual and religion, looking at the role of religion in early human societies.
The Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey has been world famous since the 1960s when excavations revealed the large size and dense occupation of the settlement, as well as the spectacular wall paintings and reliefs uncovered inside the houses. Since 1993 an international team of archaeologists, led by Ian Hodder, has been carrying out new excavations and research, in order to shed more light on the people who inhabited the site. The present volume reports on the results of excavations in 2000-2008 that have provided a wealth of new data on the ways in which humans became increasingly engaged in their material environment such that 'things' came to play an active force in their lives. A substantial and heavy involvement was with alluvial clays that surrounded the site. In the absence of large local stone, humans became increasingly involved in the extraction and manipulation of clay for a wide range of purposes - from bricks to ovens, pots and figurines. This heavy use of clays led to changes in the local environment that interacted with human activity, as indicated in the first section of the volume. In the second section, other examples of material technologies are considered all of which in various ways engage humans in specific dependencies and relationships. For example, large-scale studies of obsidian trade have drawn a complex picture of changing interactions between humans over time. The volume concludes with an integrated account of the uses of materials at Çatalhöyük based on the analysis of heavy residue samples from all contexts at the site.
This is the first book to present a comprehensive, up to date overview of archaeological and environmental data from the eastern Mediterranean world around 6000 BC. It brings together the research of an international team of scholars who have excavated at key Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites in Syria, Anatolia, Greece, and the Balkans. Collectively, their essays conceptualize and enable a deeper understanding of times of transition and changes in the archaeological record. Overcoming the terminological and chronological differences between the Near East and Europe, the volume expands from studies of individual societies into regional views and diachronic analyses. It enables researchers to compare archaeological data and analysis from across the region, and offers a new understanding of the importance of this archaeological story to broader, high-impact questions pertinent to climate and culture change.
Offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the theory of material entanglement and entrapment, enriched with vivid examples from everyday life Entangled explores how archaeological evidence can help provide a better understanding of the direction of human social and technological change, demonstrating how the interrelationship of humans and things is a defining characteristic of human history and culture. Using examples drawn from both the early farming settlements of the Middle East and daily life in the modern world, Ian Hodder highlights the complex co-dependencies of humans and things—arguing that the maintenance and sustaining of material worlds are the unseen drivers of human development. Updated and expanded, Entangled offers new perspectives on the study of the relationality between things and humans. In this edition, the author reframes relationality in terms of various forms of dependence to better explore inequality, injustice, and the ways people get entrapped in detrimental social and economic situations. An entirely new chapter focuses on human dependence on other humans, such as between colonial powers and colonized people. Increased focus is placed on object-oriented ontologies and assemblages, symmetrical archaeology, and indigenous and radical approaches in archaeology that critique relationality and posthumanism. A wide range of new examples, references, and literature are presented throughout the book. Argues that dependence on things forces humans down particular evolutionary pathways and social trends Demonstrates how long-standing entanglements can be irreversible and increase in scale and complexity over time Integrates archaeology, natural and biological sciences, and the social sciences Presents a critical review of key contemporary perspectives, including material culture studies, phenomenology, evolutionary theory, cognitive archaeology, human ecology, and complexity theory Entangled: A New Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things, Second Edition is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students, lecturers, researchers, and scholars in the fields of archeology, anthropology, material culture studies, and related fields across the social sciences and humanities.
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and Science Friday A quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history—and figure out why people abandoned them. In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers—slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers—who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia. Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.
These case studies offer new approaches to the analysis and interpretation of symbols in a variety of media and as expressed on a range of objects at different scales. This third volume in the Material Religion in Antiquity series stems from the First International Congress on the Archaeology of Symbols (ICAS I) that took place in Florence in May 2022. The archaeological process of reconstructing and understanding our past has undergone several reassessments in the last century, producing an equal number of new perspectives and approaches. The recent materiality turn emphasizes the necessity to ground those achievements in order to build fresh avenues of interpretation and reach new boundaries in the study of the human kind and its ecology. Symbols must not be conceived only as allegory but also, and perhaps mainly, as reason (raison d’être) and meaning (culture). They may be considered key elements leading to interpretation, not only in their physical manifestation but by being infused with the gestures, beliefs and intentions of their creators, created in a specific context and with a specific chaîne opératoire. In this volume a variety of case studies is offered, representing disparate ancient cultures in the Mediterranean and central Europe and the Near East. The thread that connects them revolves around the prominence of symbols and allegorical aspects in archaeology, whether they are considered as expressions of iconographic evidence, material culture or ritual ceremonies, seen from a multicultural perspective. This (and subsequent ICAS) volumes, therefore, aims to embrace all the different aspects pertaining to symbols in archaeology in a specific ‘place’, allowing the reader to deepen their knowledge of such a fascinating and multifaceted topic, by looking at it from a multicultural perspective.