Changes [Dec 03, 2007]
Bibliography
Introduction:
Speaking of the earlier part of the Neolithic in Western Asia, we have talked about two sites in SE Turkey, Göbeklitepe and Nevali Çori which offer fascinating insights into socialization of Neolithic societies at the brink of the transition from full-time hunting-gathering to agriculture. The monumental buildings that were excavated in both of these sites suggest a rich material world of symbolism and performance, spaces constructed with massive T-shaped pillars carved with animal and human imagery-zoomorphic and anthropomorphic representations.
As these sites are understood as representing some of the earliest sites of assembly and collectivity, it is fascinating how a sophisticated architectonic and a shared complex visual culture was developed, one that allows us to talk about animal symbolism, ritual, social performance, and sexuality. My understanding of the functioning of these images, both zoomorphic and sexual imagery is that the images themselves may have been understood as powerful material entities, that empowered and protected the spaces of ritual assembly, in a society where various animals may have appeared as manifestations of a shamanic spiritual world.
You have read David Lewis-Williams’s article on Çatalhöyük: is it possible that we are also seeing a society in Göbeklitepe or Nevali Çori that have a shamanic world view and shamanistic practices? The symbolism of the animal makes a lot of sense if his proposal may be accepted. The fact that the cultic buildings in Göbeklitepe and Nevali Çori were built as subterranean structures, it is likely that they may be related to an underwold of spirits.
However ritual activity among the Neolithic societies and its material culture is quite diverse across the Near East, and I want to take a look at 2 more sites today: Ain Ghazal in Jordan and Çatalhöyük in South Central Anatolian plateau.
Ain Ghazal
Site in Northwest Jordan in the outskirts of Amman, near the edge of hilly and wooded zone on the E flank of Jordan valley. Water is abundant and it is in a reliable dry-farming area. Excavations started in 1979 when a bulldozer revealed the site when constructing a highway.
First settlement started as a 2 ha small village, reaching a size of 12 ha within a millennium.
http://inic.utexas.edu/menic/ghazal/
In early 1980s, archaeologists discovered at this site 2 caches of Pre-pottery Neolithic B lime plaster statues, dated to late 8th millennium, early 7th millennium BC.
More than 30 statues in total, shaped in the form of female busts or full human figures as large as 104 cm in height. Known from other sites like Jericho as well.
These statues had skeleton twigs and reeds, and built of limestone plaster, faces and other parts of the body highlighted using black bitumen. Archaeologists who worked closely with the statues inform us that clothing, wigs and headgear were almost certainly used for the statues. The making of these statues disappear after PPNB, so we have no comparative evidence. The statues were intentionally buried in pits, some alongside with plastered human skulls (ancestors?).
Scholars suggested that they may have been associated with mortuary/funerary rituals, as the statues acted as effigies for dead ancestors. The retaining of certain skulls and their painting and special treatment, and their archaeological context with the lime plaster statues support this hypothesis.
In late pre-pottery Neolithic B, architecture become monumentalized.
Cultivated cereals and legumes in earliest phases. Goat appears as the main domesticated animal in Middle Pre-pottery Neolithic B from bone evidence. In the repertory of the figurines, cattle however dominates: it is still a wild animal at this point and must have gained a crucial cultic significance.
Çatalhöyük
The site is in the Lower Southern Central Anatolia, on the Konya plain, and composed of two mounds East and West Mounds, divided by the course of an ancient river. It is the East mound that interests us today since here is the Neolithic settlement. The west mound is Chalcolithic (c.6000 BC). The overall history of the East mound dates from 6850-6300 BC from the radiocarbon dates. This tells us that the settlement must have shifted from one side of the river to the other side through time, and the environmental reasons to this we will discuss in the future.
The East mound at Catalhoyuk was excavated by James Mellaart between 1960-4, who uncovered a large area of this enormous village, which is about 13 ha. almost incomparable in size. A new archaeological expedition has started to work at the site in 1993 under the direction of Ian Hodder, and a large archaeological team. It is a site where the most up-to-date archaeological field methods are being experimented, with an unusually large team of experts, all accompanying the work, from a variety of disciplines. Their website is exemplary in the publication of the excavation, on the internet.
Apart from very extensive evidence of the obsidian tool industry, one fascinating aspect of the settlement is the discovery of an early form of metallurgy, Lead and copper were shaped into ornaments like pendants, beads and rings and small utilitarian tools. We will see that the spread of metal will have an important impact on the history of architecture, and we will witness the introduction of metal in the decorative scheme of buildings, especially in Mesopotamia.
What the archaeologists have uncovered was a vast densely packed fabric of houses, with very elaborate recurring architectural features in each space, like wall paintings, platforms, cult installations, unusually well preserved. Similar small family houses were knit together with the absence of streets. Occasional open space that were encountered inbetween the buildings proved rather to be garbage disposal areas. The houses on the other hand had their entrances from the rooftops, through a ladder, through a hole on the roof of the building. Accordingly the house tops were mud plastered terraces, which also acted the communal outdoor space. The hearth and the oven would be then placed directly below this hole in the rooms so that the hole on the roof also acted as the chimney for the space.
The plan arrangement of the houses are surprisingly consistent, each house had a rectangular room with a narrow storage space or a compartmentalized space along one side. The large rectangular living area would also then have built-in platform, for a variety of activities in the house, a peculiar form of the shaping of your living-room. The sizes of the house units are so regular that it suggests a multiplicity of nuclear families forming a rather egalitarian society. But we have to keep in mind that still only a small portion less than 10 percent of the whole settlement has been excavated.
The construction method is quite sophisticated at this point: a timber framework of posts and beams divide the walls into a series of horizontal and vertical panels that are then filled with mudbrick and plastered. This construction technique is the precursor of what we call half-timber construction. One peculiar feature of the settlement is that even though the houses are built against each other, they almost never share walls, each space has its own walls independent of the adjoining structure.
Some of the more elaborately decorated rooms were identified by James Mellaart as shrines, but these shrines seem to be so many that this is rather hard to believe. About one third of all the rooms that were uncovered were labeled as shrine by Mellaart. The more common opinion among the archaeologists is that the practices associated with these symbolic features were so imbedded in the everyday life, that several of the houses had these features: Domestic and ritual activities were not rigidly separated both spatially and conceptually. However there is a good portion some 20% which were identified as “ritually elaborate buildings” which had more cultic installations, and inhumation burials.
Such rooms have plaster reliefs on the walls, some peculiar pillars with modelled bull’s heads and horns, as well as some fascinating paintings that are very informative about the daily life and the religious beliefs of the Catalhoyuk inhabitants. Plastering itself was obviously more than a simple finishing. The walls and the platform surfaces were plastered with fine white mud plaster over and over again, in some rooms archaeologists identified some 120 layers of plaster on one single wall. So plastering the walls and floors annually or seasonally must have some symbolic value for the Neolithic society. It is a good example of a building practice that has been induced by some structural, functional environmental necessity, but as the practice becomes part of the cycle of life and the traditions, it takes on a symbolic meaning, a ritual that is repeated over an over again for the well-being of the particular community.
The plastered walls also contained paintings on them, but they were replastered in a short period of time, they must have been visible for only a year or so. Several of such paintings, made with a thin hair brush from local natural minerals were uncovered, and the primary colors were red, red-brown, yellow, blac, gray, mauve and blue. The rows of human hand imprints remind us the Upper Palaeolithic cave paintings. Some of the walls were painted with impressive hunting scenes, dominated by a huge red bull, and a series of male figures, far too small in respective scale. Several scholars interpreted the hunting scenes not as depictions of what actually happened that is recording a definite hunting event, but the act of painting the hunting scene to capture the soul of the animal that was going to be hunted.
Another controversial scene is the large stylized vulture like birds depicted with small headless human beings, interpreted as a funerary ritual. When people died in Catalhoyuk, they took him out of the settlement and leave him in the open for the birds to consume their flesh, and only after that, their bones were brought back to the house and buried under the rooms, under the platforms. This was unfortunately not confirmed by the burials excavated below these rooms. There is no evidence of the defleshing of the bones. One of the most significant aspects of Çatalhöyük houses is the intramural inhumation, i.e. burial under the floor of living spaces, usually with elaborate grave goods and sometimes organic materials in excellent state of preservation. Sometimes the burials are so intense that in Building 1, a total of 67 individuals were buried under one room, less than 30 m2 area. Association of living and dead are particularly intimate, and did not carry the strict opposition in our modern thought-world.
The city plan painting.
Some of the walls of the houses were also decorated with reliefs modelled in mudplaster on a framework of reeds. Sometimes they were painted, showing both animal and human figures. Bull’s heads were perhaps the most common feature, pointing to a bull cult. A goddess figure giving birth is the very famous one. Rams and stags were also common. Abundantly from the site came the goddess figurines of clay, very fragile, fired in low temperature, representing an abundant fat female with exaggerated sexual organs, depicted in the state of giving birth, and accompanied with lions. The female fertility must have had a great social significance.
