James Mellaart’s lifework was tied up in Çatalhöyük until the Turkish government banned him from excavating. |
The land around Konya in south-central Turkey is flat now, a checkerboard of wheat and barley, but 9,000 years ago it was flatter still. Nine thousand years ago there were no mounds. Today, on a map of the area, the word hoeyuek, Turkish for "mound," is all over the place. Twenty miles southeast of Konya, one of the biggest mounds of all, Catalhoyuk, rises 65 feet above the plain. If you stand on its grass-covered summit with archeologist Ian Hodder and look past the white tent that shields some of his diggers from the sun, your view is unbroken for tens of miles. Nine thousand years ago Catalhoyuk was alone in this vastness, and it had only just begun to grow. This was in the Neolithic Period, the end of the Stone Age: people had only just come down from the mountains to build one of the first large settlements on the planet.
For six summers straight, Hodder, a professor at the University of Cambridge, has brought a large team here to study the mound of ruins that is Çatalhöyük (CHAH-tahl-HU-yook). He hopes to continue for the next 19 years, until he retires. There are other sites that document the Neolithic revolution—when humans gave up a hundred thousand years of wandering to farm and begin building a civilization. But none are as rich as Çatalhöyük.
Between 7000 and 6000 B.C., as many as 10,000 people lived here in boxes of mud brick, with roofs made of wood beams and reeds. Surrounded by open space, they built a town so dense it lacked streets and doorways; the residents climbed over their neighbors’ roofs to their own and then dropped in through a hole that also served as a chimney. Just generations away from a nomadic lifestyle, they chose to live in extremely crowded conditions. No one really knows why.
Çatalhöyük was built with mud bricks like these pictured above.
The flat plains (right) of central Turkey are interrupted by hundreds of mounds—each one an ancient settlement.
Besides excavating Çatalhöyük, 20 miles from Konya, Mellaart discovered another Neolithic site at Hacilar. |
For generations they lived on top of their ancestors in the floor
In those rank and smoky houses, on white plaster walls, the people of Çatalhöyük created art, lots of art. They painted strange pictures of small men confronting outsize beasts; they molded plaster reliefs of leopards, bulls, and female breasts. Under the plaster floors they buried their dead, wrapped in shrouds and accompanied by clay rings and beads and mirrors of glassy obsidian from nearby volcanoes. For generations they lived on top of their ancestors, and then at some point—again, no one knows why—they abandoned the house. They swept it clean, they cleaned out the grain bins and even the fireplace, and they knocked down the walls. Then they built another house just like it on the ruins, and the mound grew another layer.
Hodder is not the first to dig into this mound. He heard about Çatalhöyük in the late 1960s, as a student attending lectures at the University of London. The lecturer, James Mellaart, was famous for discovering the site: he had shattered the old idea that civilization had begun only in the Fertile Crescent, the arc of land from Mesopotamia to Egypt. Mellaart’s lectures were memorable. “He was hugely enthusiastic about the past, he taught without notes, and he remembered every single carbon 14 date that came out of the Near East,” a former student, Louise Martin, recalls. Mellaart’s story of Çatalhöyük was the kind that made students want to become archeologists. But he could not take them there to dig: in 1965 he had fallen into a dispute with the Turkish government.
So for 30 years the site languished. “It was clear it ought to be excavated again,” Hodder says. “There was terrible erosion, and so many questions left unanswered. It’s always been felt that it was a duty of the British to come back and resolve the mess. But that was never possible while Mellaart still wanted to come back himself.” Now Mellaart has retired and given a blessing to Hodder’s excavation—if not to his methods and results. “He’s an extraordinary mind and a great archeologist,” Hodder says. “We disagree about some of the interpretations.” Of Hodder’s project, Mellaart says: “I wouldn’t call it an excavation. Scientific research, perhaps.”
In the 30 years that separated Mellaart’s Çatalhöyük from Hodder’s, archeology changed radically. By his last season even Mellaart was out of date: scientific archeology had arrived, and with it a preference for the quantifiable over the symbolic, for testable hypotheses over stories. Then in the 1980s, some archeologists began to question their whole enterprise, to dismiss as naive the view that you could ever know what really happened in the past, and as Eurocentric the interpretations that people like Mellaart had applied to ancient cultures. Having barely become modern and scientific, archeology suddenly became postmodern.
One of the most widely respected leaders of that second revolution is Hodder. At Çatalhöyük he is getting a chance to rewrite Mellaart’s story—and to put his postmodern theories into practice.
James Mellaart is 73 now, on the short side, a bit pear-shaped, a bit jowly, a bit short of breath. He wears his roomy trousers hiked high and a tartan tie when the occasion demands it. (Mellaart is of Dutch extraction, but three centuries ago his family were MacLartys from Scotland.) Large glasses frame eyes that squeeze down to small slits of mirth as he talks. Were he standing on a windswept mound, the thin gray hair would quickly come unkempt, but he is not: he is sitting in a comfortable chair in his flat in north London. The flat, located in an unremarkable block, is richly Turkish, all dark wood and kilims and glass cabinets filled with out-of-the-ordinary curios. As Mellaart tells the story of the dig of his life, his Turkish-born wife and colleague, Arlette, intervenes with small cups of muddy coffee and occasional explanations.
A flint dagger from Çatalhöyük; most tools were obsidian. |
The importance of the site was obvious. When Mellaart finally started digging there in 1961, though, he didn’t expect it to be beautiful too; the potsherds he had found at the surface were undecorated fragments of cooking vessels. His doubts lasted about three days into the dig. “We had a narrow little trench,” Mellaart says, “and one of my workmen called me and said, ‘Sir, look.’ On the wall, a piece of plaster had fallen off. And there were paintings. That changed the whole thing.”
‘Mellaart is like a man who went to the moon. He can’t get over it’
Much older paintings had been found before in European caves, such as Lascaux in France. Those paintings dated from the Paleolithic, the Old Stone Age, when humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers. What Mellaart had found at Çatalhöyük were the oldest paintings from the Neolithic, the oldest paintings made by humans on the walls of houses they had built themselves. The first was of a hunter and a stag. More hunting scenes followed, but also pictures of men sporting with all sorts of animals, pulling their tails and tongues and riding on their backs. There were pictures of men dancing in leopard skins and of headless men being pecked by giant vultures. There was even what looked to Mellaart like an erupting volcano: probably Hasan Da˘g he decided, which is visible from the mound on a clear day, 80 miles to the northeast. Under the volcano, the artist had painted a strange pattern of rectangles that could be taken for the terraced town of Çatalhöyük itself. Mellaart said it was the first landscape painting in history.
Catalhoyuk information from Ian Hodder
Friends of Catalhoyuk
Archaeology links from Discovering Archeaology
