Men pull a deer’s tongue and a wild boar’s tail in this detail from a reproduction of a Çatalhöyük painting.

Working with a team of 50 over four seasons of furious digging, Mellaart also uncovered plaster wall reliefs of leopards butting heads and of splayed human figures he interpreted as women giving birth. In some cases they were giving birth to plaster bulls’ heads sporting real bulls’ horns, called bucrania. Some walls were festooned with those, and some plaster benches were ringed with upright bulls’ horns. But perhaps the strangest pieces of art were the plaster breasts that protruded from numerous walls; some were burst open to reveal the skulls of vultures or weasels. “Death in the midst of life?” Mellaart wondered.

Of the scads of statuettes Mellaart found, few were male. Most of the recognizable ones showed big-breasted, corpulent women. They were representations of the Mother Goddess, Mellaart said, artifacts of the earliest human religion. (These days Goddess worshippers visit Çatalhöyük by the busload.) The most famous statuette, which has become a symbol of the site, shows the Goddess astride two leopards, apparently giving birth.


Mellaart dug up some 200 houses in a 13-layer cake slice cut from one of the mound’s 32 acres. All the buildings were roughly the same size—300 square feet or so, with a single large room sometimes flanked by smaller storerooms. But 40 of them were so heavily decorated that Mellaart thought them shrines rather than houses. By chance, he decided, he had excavated the “priestly quarter” of the town, in which priestesses dressed as vultures worshipped the Goddess. With what purpose in mind? “Fertility, of course,” he says now. “Fertility! For themselves, for their animals.” Although the people of Çatalhöyük still hunted, in Mellaart’s view, they got most of their meat from domesticated cattle, and they planted a variety of crops. Thanks to the fertile earth, they had conquered hunger. That is what allowed them to create so much art.

Archeologists trowel out small squares, leaving strips for later microanalysis.

Mellaart loved to interpret that art. There was a story that went with the volcano painting: Çatalhöyük was the center of a far-flung trade in volcanic obsidian, Mellaart said. The artist was depicting the source of the town’s wealth, of its tools, and of the polished black mirrors into which women must have gazed with dawning self-consciousness. There was a story, too, for an even more obscure painting, one with symbols that looked like atomic radiation warnings (flowers, to Mellaart’s eyes), little triangles floating nearby (butterflies), and four forklike figures arranged in a cross (humans with outstretched arms). “Does this wall painting symbolize an act of homage to the great goddess on a spring morning in the Konya Plain amid fields of flowers and humming insect life nearly eight thousand years ago,” Mellaart wrote, “or is this too fanciful an interpretation?”

“Jimmy Mellaart is like a man who went to the moon,” says Louise Martin, an archeozoologist at the University of London who took Mellaart’s courses there and now works with Hodder at Çatalhöyük. “He came to this place and he hasn’t been able to get over it. The wonderful stories just roll off his tongue.” 

Ian Hodder, leader of the “postmodern” dig at Çatalhöyük.

Ian Hodder—tall, blond, slender, a very youthful man of 50—likes stories too, and in that sense he is Mellaart’s soul mate. The scientific archeology that was just coming along as Mellaart left Çatalhöyük tended to neglect stories, and to neglect art and symbolic artifacts, which aren’t amenable to scientific analysis. This approach was called processual archeology in some circles because it focused on the processes by which people adapted to their environment—what crops they planted, say, and how many calories they extracted from them. Hodder’s postmodern archeology, on the other hand, is “post-processual.” It emphasizes art and artifacts as clues to what people in the past were thinking. “People have to adapt to their environment,” Hodder says, “but their ideas and beliefs about the world have an impact on the way they adapt to it.” Hodder’s goal, like Mellaart’s, is to understand how prehistoric individuals acted at individual moments—like those spring mornings on the Konya Plain.

Will Hodder ever find enough of anything to say much of anything?

But two deep canyons separate the men. For one, Hodder can’t ignore the scientific advances that have made it possible to wring a lot more data from archeological ground. Mellaart dug with shovels, picked artifacts and bones out of the dirt with his hands, and threw the rest into an enormous spoil heap. In Hodder’s dig, much of the dirt itself is analyzed. It is sieved for tiny remains, and then it is dropped into barrels of water to separate out yet tinier ones; slivers of obsidian, for example, will sink to the bottom, while seeds will float. And as the diggers dig, sometimes for a month on a single corner of a single house, they leave strips of each mud layer intact so that a micromorphologist can come by and take samples and examine them under a microscope—to find things that would escape even the sieve and the flotation tank.

THE STORY OF ANNA

James Mellaart says the reason the Turkish government withdrew his permit to dig at Çatalhöyük after the 1965 season was that he was discovering too many paintings. True, the Turks did not have the resources to preserve all his priceless findings: some of the slabs of plaster he sent to the Anatolian Civilizations Museum in Ankara have never even been unwrapped, “I suppose people panicked,” Mellaart says. “There are disadvantages to finding too much.” But the reason for his rift with the Turks seems to have more to do with a woman named Anna, whom he met by chance on a train to Izmir in the 1950s.

When Anna entered his compartment, she was wearing a striking gold bracelet. Mellaart recognized it as Bronze Age. He remarked on it, and Anna said she had a lot more of that at home if he cared to come have a look. Mellaart did. Getting off the train in Izmir, they drove through a foggy night to an old house whose location remained murky thereafter. Anna showed him a stash of gold artifacts that ostensibly came from a place nearby, called Dorak. She said that this priceless ancient treasure belonged to her family. Mellaart had no camera, so he spent several days and nights feverishly drawing the things.

That, at least, is how the story is told in The Dorak Affair, a 1967 account of the matter by Kenneth Pearson and Patricia Connor of the London Sunday Times. Neither they nor anyone else was ever able to locate Anna’s house in Izmir, and the lady herself had vanished. She never provided Mellaart with promised photographs of the treasure, but she did authorize him to publish his drawings. He finally did in 1959, in the Illustrated London News. A few years later, when Mellaart was digging at Çatalhöyük, newspapers in Istanbul got wind of the article. They created a scandal about the foreign archeologist who had looted Turkey of a treasure no one had ever seen. Mellaart’s relations with the government never recovered.

Pearson and Connor, after an energetic investigation, concluded that the film noir scenario must have happened more or less as Mellaart related it. They suggested he may have been duped by Turkish antiques smugglers who used him to hype their wares abroad. —R. K.

The other canyon between Hodder and Mellaart is Hodder’s theory. Mellaart’s dig was pre-theoretical, straightforward, optimistic. “We dug a large hole and got out things,” explains Arlette Mellaart. The Mellaarts thought those things might tell them what really happened at Çatalhöyük—which is not at all the postmodern spirit. “Postmodernism is difficult to define,” says Hodder. “But one definition people use is the ‘end of grand narrative’—the end of the idea that there is one answer to the world. Postmodernism is much less optimistic, less certain. It focuses much more on ‘multivocality’: there are many different voices in the world and different perspectives, not just the Western one.”

Another word thrown around Çatalhöyük these days is reflexivity. The archeologists watch themselves; they even have anthropologists watching them and studying how they are perceived by nearby villagers who are also, presumably, watching them. Scientific specialists like Martin—zoologists, botanists, micromorphologists, and stone-tool specialists—tour the trenches regularly to watch the diggers. Hodder says all this watching is necessary because objective archeological facts—bones, seeds, stone tools—can never be separated from the subjective meanings that archeologists assign to them based on the context in which they are found. Because the context is destroyed by digging, interpretation has to begin “at the trowel’s edge”—and so Hodder wants a lot of people looking over the shoulder of the person with the trowel. Hodder’s archeology involves a lot of talking.

Paintings at the site are plentiful. Interpreting them is another matter altogether. We may never know what these hunting scenes and strange circles really meant.

The talk does not stop in the trenches. It continues in the pleasant dig house Hodder had built at the site, where discussions of methodology often take precedence over the study of artifacts. It continues too on the project’s Web site, where Hodder can be seen “dialoguing” with a representative of the “Goddess community.” Although Hodder, unlike Mellaart, thinks there is scant evidence that goddesses were ever worshipped at Çatalhöyük, he feels it is his duty to discuss the site with anyone and make his data available. When Goddess adepts tell Hodder they don’t want his data, because it is already contaminated by his own white-male subjectivity—well, Hodder loves that criticism. It gives him an anecdote he can use in lectures, papers, and interviews. It supports his main point: that there is no one objective reality at Çatalhöyük, no single story—as Mellaart hoped—but many stories, all with a tentative connection to reality at best.