Skull of a male (top right), whose features had 

 been repeatedly modeled in plaster and painted, is 

 shown in an artist's reconstruction. The skull was 

 recently discovered in the burial of a female (pho- 

 tograph above); it may have belonged to a revered 

 ancestor or relative of the deceased. The place- 

 ment of the skull with respect to the female skele- 

 ton is shown in red outline in the diagram at right. 



Collections of clay balls were often associated with 

 the ovens. According to research by Sonya L. Ata- 

 lay, an archaeologist at Stanford University, the balls 

 were used in cooking — just as, in many traditional 

 societies, heated stones were put in a basket or skin 

 container to boil water, or laid out to cook meat. 

 Because stones are in short supply at Catalhoyuk, 

 the clay balls served the same purpose. At later lev- 

 els, pottery containers, which could be placed di- 

 rectly over a fire, took over the heating function. 



In the houses excavated so tar, hearths and ovens 

 were generally placed on the south side of the main 

 rooms. In those areas the floor is blackened by the 

 ash and charcoal raked out from the fires. Manufac- 

 turing activities were probably carried out there: we 

 find evidence on the floors that obsidian was 

 knapped, or chipped, into tools, that beads were 

 made, that grease was extracted from animal bones. 

 Obsidian caches, as well as depressions for holding 

 pots and other small stores, were often built below 

 the floors. Little or no art appears in this "dirty" zone 

 of the main room, and the only burials here seem to 

 have been the bodies of newborns or infants. 



In contrast, the plaster floors and platforms in the 

 rest of the main room are lighter in color, and some- 

 times even white. Ridges or platform edges often sep- 

 arate this area from the "dirty" zone. The "clean" ar- 

 eas often have higher platforms and more painting, 

 and they are where burials were commonly made. 



Wh.it points most to a household level of so- 

 cial organization is the rich symbolic con- 

 tent of the houses. Paintings depict vultures flying 

 over headless human bodies, suggesting the practice, 



adopted in some parts of the world, of setting 

 out the deceased so that they can be naturally 

 defleshed. Figurines depict generously propor- 

 tioned females. One sculpture shows a female seat- 

 ed on a "throne" whose armrests are felines [see pho- 

 tograph on opposite page]. Recently we unearthed a 

 male skull, perhaps belonging to a revered ancestor, 

 over which plaster features had been periodically 

 modeled and painted. Eventually another person 

 died — a female — and the skull was buried along with 

 her [see photograph and illustrations at left] . 



What particularly fascinates me are the many leop- 

 ard motifs, including reliefs of paired 

 leopards. The images suggest that a rela- 

 tionship with wild animals was a potent 

 element in local religious ritual and be- 

 lief. In line with that interpretation, the 

 household shrines often incorporate the 

 horns of a wild bull. In contrast, the an- 

 cient artists neglected to represent most 

 of the more mundane activities, such as 

 the growing of crops. The emphasis on certain themes 

 in the art appears significant, but from our distant 

 vantage point, we can only glimpse how the people 

 of Catalhoyuk interpreted the world around them. 



Mellaart thought that some of the buildings in the 

 settlement, because of their decorative and symbol- 

 ic contents, might have been specialized shrines. We 

 now understand them all as houses, but with vary- 

 ing degrees of ritual elaboration. In the plastered 

 floor of what we call Building 1 , for example, we 

 discovered a complete fishhook pendant made from 

 a split boar's tusk, apparently placed there inten- 

 tionally. A small plaster sculpture in the shape of an 

 animal horn was inserted in one wall of the main 

 room. We also found that two holes had been dug 

 into the walls and then plastered over; we think they 

 were made to contain objects that were later re- 

 moved. A small fragment of a figurine made of an- 

 imal horn was embedded in the material used to 

 construct an oven in a side room. Perhaps those de- 

 posits were symbolically protective, or perhaps they 

 represented memories, links with the past. We can't 

 really say, but in general terms they show that con- 

 struction integrated ritual and daily practice. 



One clear result of the current excavations is the 

 demonstration that most of the burials in the houses 

 were of individual, fully fleshed bodies. Mellaart and 

 his team had found jumbled, disarticulated human 

 bones beneath the platforms in the main rooms. They 

 assumed the bodies were initially buried elsewhere 

 and then reburied beneath the platform floors. That 

 idea was supported by the paintings of vultures ap- 

 parently picking the flesh from headless human 

 corpses. But our work shows that many bodies were 



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NATURAL HISTORY June 2006 



