buried under the platforms intact: the joints are still 

 articulated and the smallest bones (often lost in re- 

 burial) are present. The jumbled nature of the bones 

 beneath some platforms, we have concluded, was the 

 result of inserting later graves within the same plat- 

 form, a frequent practice. 



Perhaps the most telling evidence for the symbol- 

 ic importance of the house in life at Catalhoyiik 

 is the meticulous procedure the inhabitants followed 

 when — for structural or other reasons — they decid- 

 ed a house had to be torn down and rebuilt. To pre- 

 pare for rebuilding, workers first cleaned and scoured 

 the walls and plaster features of the original house. 

 Then they removed the roof, dug out the main sup- 

 port posts, and dismantled the walls, usually 

 down to a height of three or four feet. Fixtures 

 such as ovens and decorative or ritual elements 

 were often removed or truncated. The old 

 house was then filled with a mixture of 

 building materials, often very care- 

 fully. For example, to preserve the 

 dome of the oven in one building, 

 soil was fed in through the side 

 opening. The fill material com- 

 monly included various arti- 

 facts — bone points, hunks 

 of obsidian, stone axes. 

 How many such objects 

 were ritual placements as 

 opposed to accidental loss- 

 es is not always clear, but 

 there are patterns to the 

 work. The enthroned fe- M 

 male figurine with felines, ' 

 which Mellaart discovered 

 in a bin, seems to have been 

 placed there for some sym- 

 bolic motive. 



Before the current project 

 began excavating houses in 

 1995, I had assumed we 

 would just dig down and find 

 houses frozen in time, static 

 entities rather like the ones I 

 had seen represented in Mellaart's reconstructions. 

 But what we really discovered were processes. The 

 new excavations show how the inhabitants of Catal- 

 hoyiik were always tinkering with the internal de- 

 tails ot their homes. The various areas of a house 

 might have had prescribed differences in flooring, 

 height, color, plaster, matting, and so forth. But there 

 were also continual adjustments in the course of dai- 

 ly life, as the spaces were remade, reworked, moved, 

 or used for different purposes. 



Can we begin to understand what it was like to 

 live in the houses of Catalhoyiik? It is often said that 

 they were dark inside. But an experimental house built 

 at the site by Mirjana Stevanovic, an archaeologist at 

 the University of California, Berkeley, has shown that 

 during the day so much light pours in from the stair 

 entry that the main room is quite bright. Since the 

 white plastered walls were so frequently renewed and 

 often burnished, they reflected the light well. Even 

 the side rooms got some reflected light; as one's eyes 

 adjusted to the relative gloom, it would have been 

 possible to carry out indoor activities. 



A child growing up in such a household would 

 soon learn how the space was organized — where to 

 bury the dead and where to make beads, where to 

 find the obsidian cache and where to place of- 

 Bk ferings. Eventually, he or she would learn how 

 Vi m to rebuild the house itself. Thus the rules of 

 ociety were transferred not through some 

 centralized control, but through the daily 

 practices of the household. All those 

 practices were carried out in the pres- 

 ence of dead ancestors and within a 

 symbolic world immediately 

 at hand, conveyed through 

 21 rich artistic representation. 



Baked clay figurine, about eight inches tall, was dis- 

 covered by Mellaart in a grain bin. It was probably 

 deposited there as an offering or memento when, 

 in preparation for rebuilding the house, the inhabi- 

 tants tore down the upper walls and filled in the 

 foundation. Mellaart restored the missing heads of 

 the seated woman and one of her feline armrests. 



ut why such a large 

 settlement should 

 flourish precisely when and 

 where it did still eludes us. 

 Perhaps it enabled people 

 to build up a network of re- 

 lationships that would 

 serve to control access to 

 resources. Living close to- 

 gether meant that those re- 

 lationships could be contin- 

 ually reinforced and moni- 

 tored. By joining with others 

 at the one site, each house- 

 hold could also better pro- 

 mote its own interests: find- 

 ing marriage partners for its 

 young people, developing 

 exchange alliances, cementing links through ances- 

 try, and so on. 



But then again, we know that some evidence 

 could suddenly emerge to suggest a quite different 

 explanation. And so our excavations, and our in- 

 formed speculations, will continue. □ 



This article has been adapted from Lm Hodder's forthcoming book, The 

 Leopard's Tale: Revealing (he Mysteries ot QatalhSyiik, which is 

 being published this month by Thames 6 Hudson Inc. 



June 2006 NAIURAI HISTOR.Y 



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