MALE SPEAKER:
Welcome, everybody,
to one more Authors
at Google talk.
Today with us is
Ian Hodder, who is
going to talk about
the original origins of
settled life in the
Middle East, specifically
Gobekli and Catalhoyuk,
two archaeological sites
from the early Neolithic.
Ian Hodder was trained at
the Institute of Archaeology,
University College, London and
at Cambridge University, where
he obtained his Ph.D. In 1975.
After a brief period
teaching at Leeds,
he returned to Cambridge,
where he taught until 1999.
During that time, he became
Professor of Archaeology,
and elected a fellow
of the British Academy.
In 1999, he moved to teach
at Stanford University
as the Family Professor in
the Department of Anthropology
and Director of the Stanford
Archaeologist Center.
His main large scale
excavation projects
have been at [? Heatherhem ?]
in the east of England
and Catalhoyuk in Turkey,
where he has worked since 1993.
He has been awarded the
Oscar Montelius Medal
by the Swedish Society of
Antiquaries, the Huxley
Memorial Medal by the Royal
Anthropological Institute,
has been a Guggenheim Fellow,
and has honorary doctorates
from Bristol and
Leidon Universities.
His main books include "Spatial
Analysis in Archaeology,
Symbols in Action," "Reading
the Past, the Domestication
of Europe," "The Archaeological
Process," "The Leopard's Tale,
Revealing the Mysteries
of Catalhoyuk,"
and "Tangled, An Archaeology
of the Relationship
Between Humans and Things."
Please join me in welcoming
Ian Hodder to Google.
[APPLAUSE]
IAN HODDER: So I wanted to start
by thanking Boris and Talks
at Google for inviting
me to come and talk
to you about the topic of
ritual origins in the Middle
East, which must be a rather
long way from your usual sets
of interests.
And so I look forward
to your comments
on what I'm going to say.
I'm going to be talking about
the origins of settled life
in the Middle East, and arguing
that the new findings suggest
that ritual and social
symbolism of various sorts
turns out to be very key to
the origins of settled life.
And I'm going to be using the
new excavations at Gobekli
as an example, but also
using the excavations
that I've been carrying
at Catalhoyuk in Turkey
as an example.
So the problem is a very
straightforward one, really,
which is that for
the vast majority
of human life on Earth, we
have been hunter-gatherers.
And so for hundreds
of thousands of years,
modern humans moved
around the landscape
in very small groups,
small settlements,
short-term settlements,
as hunters and gatherers,
leading these sorts of
traces, scatters of bones,
and stone tools, and
reconstructed in the way
that you see down there.
So for a long time
then, people were
living in this sort of low
density, scattered, mobile way.
And then between
10,000 and 7,000 BC,
things changed, and
we ended up living
in things like this, large
agglomerations-- this
is Catalhoyuk that we'll come
back to later-- of maybe 8,000
people living cluster together
over long periods of time.
So the question is,
why did that happen?
Why aren't we still
hunters and gatherers?
Why did this change
occur, and why did it
occur at this particular moment?
One of the contributory
factors is undoubtedly climate,
because it's clear that
during the last ice age,
one has a cold climate that
warms up around 10,000 BC.
And so you have the
modern warmer climate.
This graph doesn't show
the contemporary warming.
But you see this fairly stable
period from about 10,000 BC.
And the emergence
of settled life
occurs all around the world
at about this sort of Holocene
period, in the early Holocene.
So it's undoubtedly the case
that climate has something
to do with this shift.
But most people feel that
climate isn't the sole factor.
But maybe not even
the main factor,
because there are
earlier warmer periods
way back in the ice
age in the Pleistocene,
which did not lead
to the same response.
So there are clearly
other factors
that have to be involved.
And by far, the sort of dominant
theories, the dominant view
of why settled life
began, why urbanism,
if you like, the
origins of urbanism
began, the main theories
derived from column Karl Marx,
and derived from Karl
Marx in pre-history,
is the figure of V.
Gordon Chide, who
coined the term, the
Neolithic Revolution.
And so following Marx, he saw
this as a revolutionary event
that created settled
life, and he saw it
as primarily the result of
an intensification of use
of the environment,
use of resources,
particularly the domestication
of plants and animals.
So the idea was
the domestication
of plants and animals meant that
you could get more resources
out of a given
area of land, which
meant that people could stay
there longer and collect,
and larger numbers of
people could be supported.
There were other
ancillary ideas, such
that the collection of the
domestication of plants
and animals led to the
creation of a surplus, which
would allow people to store
and build up property and have
ownership.
And that that was also seen
as an important development
at this time, linked
ultimately to the development
of ranking and social hierarchy.
But the key idea was
that the domestication
of plants and animals was the
trigger that allowed people
to live in the same place
over a long period of time
and aggregate.
Now the idea of a revolution
has been largely discredited.
It's clear that the
process of settling down
was a very, very long slow
one that took thousands
and thousands of years.
But the idea that
the domestication
of plants and animals
was key to settled life
has remained a very,
very important idea.
That basically, the
economy is what did it.
And that's why the site at
Gobekli is very important.
Because Gobekli basically
turns this on its head.
Because Gobekli is a
very remarkable site
that disproves that basic idea.
So Gobekli itself has been
excavated by the German
Archaeological Institute.
The excavator there
for a long time
was Klaus Schmidt, who
sadly died recently.
And the excavations are
continuing nevertheless,
and I'm very grateful to
[INAUDIBLE] for allowing
me access to some of
these images and results
that I'm going to
be talking about.
So Gobekli Tepe in
Southeast Turkey.
And you can see that
it's a set of mounds
on a very high
hill that overlooks
a really impressive landscape
out there in Southeast Turkey.
So it's a very, very
dominant prominent location.
And if we look at
the excavations that
are taking place
on this hill, we
find that we see these
very remarkable circles
of upright stones, these
sort of megalithic circles,
with two interior
stones as well.
These upright monoliths
creating these circles, a number
of them, on this mound.
And this is all beginning
around 9,000 BC.
So very, very early.
And these upright pillars,
or monoliths, or stele,
are yet more remarkable,
because they have all
this really wonderful imagery
on that I'll come back to later.
Many of these stones
are enormous in size,
some up to six meters high.
Enormous skill to produce them.
Very thin.
Often talked of as
t-shaped pillars,
because they have that
sort of overall T shape.
Clearly to construct
these sorts of monuments
involves a lot of labor
by a lot of people.
And so one of the
most striking things
is that there must been a lot
of collective organization
in order to produce
these monuments.
The quarrying is
done fairly locally,
but simply the carving
out, the construction
of them, the putting
them upright,
and the construction of
these walls around them,
involves a huge amount of labor.
Now the very important
aspect about this
is that this is a society
which does not yet
have full plants and
animal domestication.
So these are really
still hunter-gatherers.
There's a beginning to being
moved towards the domestication
of plants and animals, but
that hasn't yet occurred here
at around 9,000 BC.
So these are basically
hunter-gatherer societies
who are coming
together to create
these large monuments in which
a lot of collective labor
is needed.
And that seems somehow to then
generate occupation around it.
So here is a photograph of these
circular stone constructions,
and there's a plan here.
And this is the earliest phase.
And then you can see around it
these sort of very simple round
or roundish houses that emerge.
And then through time, you
begin to get rectangular houses.
And in fact, the temples, the
equivalents of those things,
become rectangular.
So the sequence that
one can reconstruct here
is that people originally
come together, perhaps
from a very large landscape,
they come together in order
to construct these monuments,
these rituals, circles
themselves, and then
gradually people
live and live there longer
and longer until you
have a settlement that
grows up around them.
So this is very much saying
that at a very early date,
hunter-gatherers
are coming together
to create community
out of reasons
that are social and ritual.
And it's not the economy that
is the driving force here.
Indeed, Gobekli has a
lot of these circles.
This is the area
that we've just been
looking at where excavation
has been taking place.
They've done ground
penetrating radar
in the other parts of this set
of mounds on this high hilltop.
And you can see that the
ground penetrating radar
is picking up lots
of these circles.
In fact, there
seem to be about 18
of these circles on the site.
If we look at the
stones themselves,
it's been argued that they
represent people in some way.
That they're representations
of mythical people or ancestors
in some way.
And you can see that they've
got the arms coming down
on the side there, and
then the hand, if you like,
on the front.
And there's the belt,
it's interpreted
as a belt, going
around, and this
is a loin cloth at the front.
And as I said before,
the T shape at the top
suggests to many people that
these are anthropomorphic,
and that they somehow
maybe represent ancestors,
or important mythical beings.
And then on these ancestors,
or on these stele,
there's a whole sort
of carving, lots
of carving of various types
of imagery, much of it
to do with violence, and
sex, and sometimes death.
So for example, you see lions
here, bulls, and wild boar
here.
Also, some bird type forms.
At the top in the
middle, there's
an image of a woman either being
penetrated or menstruating.
It's not exactly how
to interpret that.
But on the whole, the
imagery is very male.
And I don't know if you can
see from where you're sitting,
but most of the wild animals
have the male genitalia
clearly shown.
A lot of the imagery
is associated
with violence in various ways.
Here's another one of
these T-shaped pillars
with a wild boar and this sort
of monstrous figure crawling
up and down it.
And here's one of
these walls going
'round these enclosures
with a serpent type figure
coming out of it.
You see another
image of that there,
and these sort of
bared teeth and fangs
of these sort of
mythical creatures,
and snakes, and so on.
Here's another of these
T-shaped forms over here,
with a wild boar
and perhaps a fox
there, and these
ducky type things.
Over here, there's a
very fascinating stone.
Again, you see the
t-shaped generally.
Just one point to make is
that I'm talking about these
as if it's all one phase.
In fact, the [INAUDIBLE] is
much more complex than that.
And you can see how
this pillar here
has had this wall built up
against it at a later date,
and there's lots
of use and reuse
of these things over time.
But this particular image is,
I think, a fascinating one.
I won't go through all
the different parts of it.
But you can even see sort of
wild and dangerous animals
again.
There's some sort of a scorpion.
There, we often gets spiders.
You can see a scorpion
tail again here,
and a wild boar or something
coming out the side there.
But perhaps most
fascinating are these sort
of birds here that
look vaguely humanoid,
and there's some sort of human
bird mixing going on here.
And this bird here seems
to be doing something
with a spherical object.
Perhaps playing with
a ball or something.
And then down here, you have
this bird with, on its back,
is a human with an erect
penis and without a head.
And we'll talk later about
sort of headlessness,
how that's such an important
part of this symbolism.
But it's very tempting,
as someone has done here,
to suggest that that is actually
the head that the bird has
taken, and is somehow taking off
or playing with from that body.
And here, you got
a close-up of that.
So Gobekli is right
in the middle here.
Get this to work.
So just in here.
And it's a larger version of a
series of sites that gradually
emerged that are shown
by these T-shaped symbols
in upper Mesopotamia.
And through time, a whole
series of other sites
emerged, shown by these circles,
that are similar in the sense
that they start in
hunter-gatherer context,
with big ritual structures
of various sort,
and then you have a set
of houses around them.
So one can talk then about,
throughout this region,
about a sort of settling
down, and a focus
on these important ritual
buildings and centers.
And what's fascinating is that
recent genetic work on wheat
has shown that the first
domestication of Einkorn wheat
probably began at
[INAUDIBLE], which
is right in the center
of all this stuff.
And so it's possible
very much to turn
the sort of Marx-Childean
theory on its head,
and to argue that it was
the settling down that
led to the need for more
intensive production,
and then ultimately to the
domestication of wheat,
and of course, sheep, and
goat, and the full range
of domesticates that we know
come from the Middle East
during the Neolithic.
Just to point out, there
are a number of other sites,
as I've just shown you, but
just to show how widespread they
are, here's in Jordan a site
called Wadi Faynan, which again
has some sort of big complex
ritual structure up there,
and a whole series of small
houses that cluster around it.
Another site that you will
all have heard of is Jericho.
And Jericho has very
important Neolithic levels.
Very important concentration
of early settled life.
And as part of, that there is
this very remarkable tower,
a monumental tower, that
has a stairway that goes up
and would have
gone up to the top,
but there is also
burials, human burials,
that are placed in this.
So again, we have some
sort of large ritual
collective structure around
which settlement occurs.
So this new story about
the origin of settled life
is a fascinating one, and we
can step forward a little bit
of few thousand years.
We've just been
looking at Gobekli,
which starts around 9,000
BC, and moving on now
to Catalhoyuk, which is
about 7,000 BC, where
we'll see lots of parallels,
but also contrasts with Gobekli.
And what we're
finding at Catalhoyuk
adds a lot to the story.
So this is the
mound at Catalhoyuk
that is Neolithic in date.
And you can see it's in the
Konya Plain, which is about--
so the site is about three
to four hours south of Ankara
by car.
And this is how we
reconstruct Catalhoyuk.
We already saw earlier an image
of how we see it in detail.
But this is in its landscape.
So this is, as I said before, a
large concentration of people.
We think up to 8,000
people were living here.
So we've moved on from
Gobekli in the sense
that these are much larger
agglomerations of people.
There's also a big difference
from Gobekli in that now we
have agriculture.
So this is a site that
has domesticated sheep,
and it has domesticated plants.
A lot of the resources
are still wild.
And as we'll see later,
the cattle in particular
are still wild.
But this is a society that
has just started agriculture.
And the other thing that
we see is that there
is no ritual center here.
That there's no ceremonial
center and no circles
of stones of any sort.
There are no public buildings.
This is just a very,
very large number
of people in relative
terms living in one place.
Another very
important part of this
is that they lived
there for a long time.
This has become very
stable societies.
Quite the opposite of those
Upper Paleolithic Pleistocene
societies.
At Catalhoyuk,
this is where we're
excavating in the south part
of the site in a small area.
And we have about 21 meters of
occupation, about 18 levels.
So people lived on
houses, knocked them down,
built other houses on top,
and so on and so forth
over a thousand years.
So this incredibly stable
society doing the same thing
repetitively over a very,
very long period of time.
So by this time, people
have really got the answer.
They really know how to be
stable long-term settlements.
In the north part
of the site, we're
excavating in order
to find not so
much the depth of occupation,
but to understand what it looks
like at any one moment in time.
And this gives you a sense
of how all the houses are
tightly packed together.
In fact, they're so
tightly packed together,
there is no room for streets.
And although you might think
that these alleyways and so on,
these actually were used
just for rubbish deposition,
and they're not streets.
People moved around
on the surface,
on the roofs of the houses,
and then went down a ladder
into the interior.
So one of the
questions is, how is it
possible for people to live,
large numbers of people
to live together, in this
sort of collective way?
How was that organized?
And in order to understand
how it was organized,
it's important to
look inside the houses
and try to make sense of the
elaborate symbolism and ritual
that we find there.
These are pictures
taken from the work
that James Mellaart did at
Catalhoyuk in the 1960s.
And as you can see
here the latter
that people would move to
come down from the roof,
and they come down into the
south part of the house,
where there was lots of evidence
of food and food preparation.
And then you see all the other
types of symbolism, a lot of it
to do with bulls
in various ways.
But you also see
at the top of there
something that should be
reminiscent to you, which
is headless bodies and birds.
So this is a link to Gobekli.
We also saw lots of
boars at Gobekli.
So there are lots of parallels
in the symbolism of the two
sites.
Here is a pair of
bull horns that
are set around--
these are wild bull
horns that are set
around a platform in one
of these houses.
And I'm just going to play you
a little reconstruction done
by a group called
Corinth on what it looked
like inside these houses.
So this is turning
around and looking
at the south part of the house,
where you would come down
the ladder, and where you
have the concentration
of domestic activities,
particularly around the hearth
and around the oven.
And in our excavations,
we find large amounts
of a dense concentrations of
everyday activity in this area.
There also entrances
into side rooms.
And then as you move
northwards in the house,
there's lots of other types
of elaborate symbolism
around these various platforms.
The roof is often flat.
But in this case, it seems
to have been modified
in order to allow for this
particular image, which
I'll explain later, we think
is a bear, a wild bear.
There are other
types of animals.
But particularly, the
skulls of wild bulls
play a very important
part in the imagery
inside these houses.
And one of the most
fascinating things
about this focus
on wild bulls is
this at this time at
Catalhoyuk, the cattle
are not domesticated.
But in the later levels,
they are domesticated.
And so it seems that
one can argue again
that initially, people
are interested in animals
for ritual or social
symbolic reasons,
and that itself then leads to
the domestication of cattle
later on.
So again, it seems like
ritual and social functions
are important, and
that leaves as sort
of as an accidental
byproduct to them
the actual domestication
of animals.
Of cattle in this case.
We've already seen
this type of figure
with upraised arms in
that last reconstruction.
This is one of the
aversions of that.
And we think that these
are probably bears,
and we've done that because
we find these stamps seals
that we think are
clearly bears they
have the same sort of upraised
arms and legs type of form.
And we also find traces
of the bear claws,
so we think bear claws
were stuck in the walls
here, and then removed when
the thing is abandoned.
So there are bear
claws, and we also
find the tusks of a wild
boar stuck into walls.
Pairs of leopards are another
important theme in Catalhoyuk.
And we also find the claws
of leopards in the site.
So there seems to be a real
fascination with wild animals,
and with bringing in the
horns, the teeth, the tusks,
the claws, and so on
of them into the house
and sticking them
into the walls.
Some of the houses have
these wonderful paintings
that seem to show--
initially, you might think,
are these people
hunting wild animals?
But in fact, they're not.
They're teasing
and baiting them.
And so what you see is
in case of bearded men
wearing these spotted things
around their waist, which
we interpret as Leopard skins,
and they are pulling the tail,
and pulling the
snout, and pulling
the tongue of this
deer, of this stag,
again with an erect penis.
And remember that relates
to the type of symbolism
we saw at Gobekli.
And this is-- you can't see this
so well, but this a bull, again
with lots of people around
wearing leopard skins,
teasing and baiting the bull.
And I'm just going to show
you another little video
reconstruction.
This is incorrectly called
the shrine of the hunters.
But we don't see these
as shrines anymore.
We see them as houses.
And as I said, they're
not ready hunting.
They're teasing and baiting.
But then what this
reconstruction
by a team at Southampton
does very well
is to give you a sense of
how these paintings are
arranged in a house.
You see people jumping on,
teasing this bear here,
wild bear, and
dancing, and running
towards that particular
set of activities there.
Here's that image of a bull
with lots of people around it,
and teasing him, baiting other
types of animals over there.
So the important
thing is lots and lots
of people involved
in these images.
And again, this is in the
context of domestic house,
coming down the
ladder with the oven
beneath the ladder in the
south part of the house.
And the way we interpret
this is that we think
these teasing and baiting
rituals took place,
and then the
animals were killed.
And then we have evidence
on the site of feasting,
so large amounts of people
feasting on these wild animals.
And then, taking the
various tokens or symbols
of those animals
and putting them
in the house as
memories or mementos
of these important
social events when
people gathered and
came together in killing
and eating these animals.
So we have, then, this
evidence of collective action
at Catalhoyuk associated
with wild animals.
But you might have
thought that all
of this organization, this
large number of people living
together, would have
within necessitated
some sort of central hierarchy.
But that is not what
we find at Catalhoyuk.
We think Catalhoyuk is an
aggressively egalitarian
society, where showing
difference was not
really allowed.
So what we've done here, for
example, is on this line,
is we've just ordered all the
houses from the less elaborate
to the more elaborate,
where more elaborate means
they have more of
that type of symbolism
I've just been showing you.
And if we try and correlate
that with, for example,
this other line, is the number
of figurines that are found
in the house, you might have
thought that the more elaborate
houses, the higher
status houses,
would have more
figurines, but they don't.
There's no correlation.
And we can't find any
correlation at all
with anything that relates to
the elaborateness of the house.
So the more elaborate houses
with more symbolism and bulls
horns and things in them do not
have more storage, for example.
They have the same or less
storage as other buildings.
They don't have more evidence
of production in anyway.
So this seems to be a
society in which you
could have a lot of
symbolism in your house,
but that doesn't mean that you
have higher status in some way.
In fact, we can find no
chiefly house, or chiefly
center, or high status house.
Everybody seems to
be about the same.
Everybody has the same
amount of storage,
the same amount of productive
facility, and so on.
So as I said, this is a
very egalitarian society.
So that again raises even
more strongly the issue of,
how do you hold people
together, 8,000 people together,
living day to day?
How do you hold all that
together and organize it
all without any
central authority?
And we've seen that
one of the ways
you do that is by having
collective rituals associated
with wild animals.
But I want to show
you some other ways
in which I think it was done.
So this is a model of part
of the excavation area.
And you can see these
different houses
that we've been excavating.
But I want to focus on that
particular, Building 80.
And this is looking
down into Building 80.
The West wall here
has been removed.
We're looking at the
north and the east wall.
And here in the south part
of this main room, again
we have the oven,
and the hearth.
It's just you can't
see it down in here.
And this is the platform
where the ladder comes down
from the roof, so you'd walk
down into this building here
above the oven, come
into the building,
and move northwards where
you have all these platforms.
These scars on the wall
are where originally, you
would have had upright posts
that help to hold the house up.
But when we were working
on this bit of wall here,
we found painting.
And as we gradually took off
the hundreds and hundreds
of very fine layers of
plaster that were probably
put on monthly
during the Neolithic
in order to keep the
house white and clean,
as we took off these
hundreds of layers,
we came down to
this painting that
has a very sort of simple
and distinctive form,
has these uprights, and then
these triangles on the side,
and then this sort of
brick-shaped pattern.
And again, you see it here,
upright in the triangle
and the brick-shaped pattern.
And this is it again.
And this is in
this building here.
There's another painting,
right on the other side
of the excavated
area, which again
has these uprights,
and the triangles,
and the brick-shaped
design in between.
So it's very, very
difficult to imagine
the people who made these
two paintings didn't
see each other's painting.
I mean, this is clearly
a sign of a connection.
There are no other paintings
like this through the area.
So this is a very
particular link
between these two buildings,
suggests a particular part
of a network there.
And if we do this for
all the other symbols,
we end up with this very,
very complicated set
of links between houses.
I've linked here houses
that have leopard
relies, or have these
bear-splayed figures, or horn
benches, or painted
hands, or something.
So these different ways
in which these symbols
connect different parts
of the settlement.
Another very important way
that buildings were connected
is through burial.
And I haven't talked so far
about how people were buried.
But Catalhoyuk is
as much an acropolis
as it is a settlement.
And the size of
these circles here
is an indicator
of how many people
are buried beneath the
floors of the houses.
And you can see that some
houses have no burials,
whereas some have quite a lot.
So beneath the house
floors, people are buried.
And you can have up to 62 people
buried beneath one house floor.
And 62 is many too
many people to be
produced by one small family
living in one of these houses.
So this suggests that people are
being buried into these houses
from other houses, and that's
why some houses have lots
of burials, and some have none.
So we see that houses
are connected by the fact
that they bury together.
So there's a community
of houses that
bury their dead in a
central burial house.
And as I said before,
that central burial house
is no different from
any other house.
It doesn't have
any special status.
It is just a burial house.
But we also find that the
people buried in these houses
ate together.
And we know that because
we can study the isotopes,
the bone isotopes.
And so here, we've got
carbon and nitrogen isotopes,
and we're looking at individuals
from these different houses.
And where you have the
same symbol of use,
that's because they are
buried in the same house.
So you can see that
there's actually
a lot of clustering in this.
But you can see that
some clustering that's
been marked out, the
result of clustering
are the overlaps here.
And particularly this
group of squares over here
suggests some sort
of clustering.
So this suggests that people
ate together as well as
buried together.
So the group of houses
that buried together also
ate together.
And you might think, oh
well, that's obvious.
These are somehow
extended nuclear families.
But it becomes more
complicated than that.
So we haven't been able-- I
can't show you yet ancient DNA
results that we've been doing.
We had great difficulty getting
ancient DNA out of Catalhoyuk,
and we're now in
a new program that
seems to be more successful.
So I can't show you results
from the ancient DNA work.
But what we have been
doing is use teeth
as a proxy for
genetic proximity.
So what has happened
here is that we've
taken teeth from the
individuals in the houses
and measured 53 different
dimensions of teeth, which
are thought to be
aspects of teeth which
are genetically transmitted.
And so it should be the case
that if you find clusters
of individuals
with similar teeth,
that they should be closely
related genetically.
So we do find these clusters,
but they're not in the houses.
They're all spread around
all over the place.
It's not the case
that people who
are buried in the same house
are any more closely related
to each other than people
in the community at large.
So how do you explain that?
Well, the way we
explain it, and there
are ethnographic
parallels for this,
is that soon after
birth, children
are distributed
around the settlement.
So you don't grow up with
your mother and father,
your genetic mother and father.
You grow up with other
members of the community
in other buildings,
in other houses.
So cross-cutting all
of this, cross-cutting
the groups of people who bury
and have all these symbols,
you also have all the
genetic cross-cutting things,
where people are
linked to each other
through their genetic histories.
In a way, the whole of
Catalhoyuk, because of this way
children are treated,
the whole of Catalhoyuk
is one family that's
all tied together.
And so this is a very,
very dense network.
It means that any
individual house
can call on lots and lots of
different types of relationship
if they run out of food,
or if they have a bad year,
or if they have
difficulties in some sort.
So why do people come
together at Catalhoyuk?
In my view, they
mainly come together,
not only at this
site, at other sites,
because they can link
into these very, very
dense, complex networks
that supports them
when there are times of
hardship, or they need support.
By coming together,
one can become involved
in this very dense network.
And it's this dense
network, and the sets
of beliefs that go along with
it, that create the conformity,
and that create the
set of social rules
that organize and run
the society as a whole.
I just want to add another
way in which this happens.
So at Catalhoyuk,
when you were buried,
you sometimes had your head
removed after a period of time.
So maybe a year later, somebody
went down and took off the head
from that individual, and then
reburied the bones and so on.
So the head was taken out.
And these heads, we know, were
kept for a long period of time.
So they were often painted.
Sometimes, the facial
features were plastered back
onto the skull.
They were circulated for
a long period of time.
And then ultimately, they were
deposited in various ways.
Sometimes they were deposited
at the base of the posts that
hold up the house.
So the ancestor, if you
like, was holding up a house.
In this particular case,
there's a plastered skull here.
You can't probably
see it very well,
but there's skull in
here with the nose
and the facial
features plastered on,
and this is a reconstruction
here, the plastered face.
And this is a woman's skull.
And this is a woman.
So this skull was kept in
society for quite a long period
of time before being
deposited with this woman when
she was buried.
So if you came to Catalhoyuk, as
you moved around the site, you
what you would find
in the Neolithic
that there were body
parts, human body parts,
that were being circulated
in the community as a whole.
These are mainly
skulls, but we also
have evidence that arms and
legs and other parts of the body
were kept and circulated.
So again, you see how
this creates a network.
All the people who are
associated with the skull, who
are related to the skull, all
the people who were related
to the individual from
whom the skull was obtained
and so on, again it
creates is very, very sort
of dense network of people.
So what I've tried to
argue is that at one level,
there are a lot of similarities
between Gobekli and Catalhoyuk.
Very similar sets of symbolism.
But the big difference is
that at Catalhoyuk, this
has become a domestic
cult, and has
integrated into everyday life.
And Gobekli, it's very much
part of a ritual center.
And in concluding,
what I've been trying
to argue is that these types
of collective ritual action
occur in both places
associated with the killing,
teasing, baiting, and
feasting on wild animals
and creating memories
around those events,
but as well as this focus on
the collective of that type,
we also get the focus on
death and ancestry, which
not only, again, create
linkages and relationships
between people, but also very
crucially create time depth.
So it's not enough
to have a network.
You need to have that
network that has time depth.
And that's because of the nature
of intensive use of resources
and agriculture.
In agriculture, there
is a delayed return
for your labor input.
As a hunter-gatherer, we
go of and kill an animal,
and we share it, and then
we can just disperse.
There's nothing to
hold us together.
But with farming, we
clear the land together,
and we invest in plows, or
in other types of equipment.
So we've invested, and we have
to hold the community together
before we get to
return for that labor.
And so the crucial
distinction about farmers
is that they have time depth.
And the important thing
is that time debt focus
emerged very early,
even before farming,
and before settled life.
The focus on history making
happens very, very early,
as hunter-gatherers
become more intensive
and start investing in
more and more things.
And that takes me
into another topic,
which the a topic of my book,
which is "Entanglement,"
because I think a very
important key thing here,
which I haven't talked about,
is how humans just get entangled
in more and more stuff.
And that entanglement leads
to longer term relationships
of various sorts.
But the domestication
of plants and animals
is an example of entanglement.
But one could extend that to
all the other types of things
like houses, and
pottery, and so on that
people are beginning
to make at this time.
So thank you very much, and I
look forward to your comments.
[APPLAUSE]
MALE SPEAKER: Questions.
AUDIENCE: How far is
Catalhoyuk from Gobekli?
IAN HODDER: Quite a long way.
So Gobekli is the right in
the southeast of Turkey,
and Catalhoyuk is
right in the middle.
I figured I actually don't
know what the numbers are,
but it must be 600,
700, 800 kilometers.
Something like that.
AUDIENCE: How does the
kind of observations
of ritual and
culture in this area
compare to other areas
of the ancient world?
IAN HODDER: Well, I should say,
when you say the ancient world,
there are lots and
lots of locations
for the origins of agriculture.
It used to be thought
that there were very few,
but now we recognize that
you have independent origins,
obviously in China, in New
Guinea, in the Americas,
in Africa, and so on.
So there are lots and
lots of independent,
with different crops,
and different processes,
and different sequences.
So on the whole, the modern view
is that very different things
happen in different places.
And I'm not trying to make
an argument, generally.
I'm just trying to make
an argument for this one
particular case.
Which is often seen
as a sort of key case,
because it's probably
the earliest.
AUDIENCE: Sorry,
I forgot the name,
but there's a site in Jordan
that's supposed to be--
IAN HODDER: [INAUDIBLE]?
AUDIENCE: No.
Before that.
IAN HODDER: Gobekli?
AUDIENCE: It was in
Steve [INAUDIBLE] book.
No, in Jordan.
It was Ain-something or other
that he, according to his book,
it's been populated
since 10,000 BC,
and they also
developed agriculture
while they were living there.
So they were first
just collecting,
and then started planting
later, and stuff like that.
I think it's about
the same time--
IAN HODDER: That's right.
It's probably Ain Ghazal.
Yes.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: So how-- I
mean, from what I read,
they don't have the
same amount of ritual
as you described in Catalhoyuk.
And how would you
compare the two?
IAN HODDER: Ain Ghazal does have
a lot of very elaborate ritual.
I mean, particularly ancestral
cults of various sorts.
There are quite
remarkable collections
of these plastered figures
that were found in a big pit.
And do you know--
AUDIENCE: They look
like-- not the leopards--
IAN HODDER: No, no, no.
And so--
AUDIENCE: And all
the animal parts.
IAN HODDER: No, that's right.
AUDIENCE: And neither
the type of structure
where they use the
roofs for access,
and just throw out stuff.
They seem to be more easygoing.
IAN HODDER: [LAUGHING]
I mean, Gobekli and Catalhoyuk
are really distinctive,
in that for various
reasons, they
have this enormous concentration
of stuff that survived.
And you do get little
bits and pieces of it
in nearly all these other sites.
You get, for
example, a depiction
of a headless body, or a
vulture, or a bucranium,
which is a bull's head.
So there are lots of bits and
pieces all over the place.
But in general terms, all of
it is about either wild animals
or about ancestry.
And I imagine that you
have similar amounts stuff,
but a lot of it will be on
things that haven't survived.
And Catalhoyuk and Gobekli, it's
just lucky for various reasons
that their stuff
was preserved there.
AUDIENCE: So do you find
any evidence of conflict
with outsiders?
Do find any evidence of
protection structures
or something like that?
Or is this just a settlement,
and you know, like everybody
was living peacefully?
IAN HODDER: Yes.
So the dominant
view of my project
so far has been
that it's a society
with very little violence.
There are not being defensive
structures of any sort.
And there is no evidence
of lots of violent attack.
So in many archaeological
sites around the world
of a later time period,
you find skeletons
with arrowheads stuck
through the spine,
or stuck through the skull.
We haven't found anything
like that at all.
So in my view, this was a
very, very well-ordered,
structured, peaceful society.
Catalhoyuk is very much on its
own in a very large landscape,
so there's not a lot of
competition from outside.
But that has been
recent work that
is starting to
challenge a bit of that,
because more careful
study is showing
a lot of depressed fractures
on skulls on Catalhoyuk people.
And these seem to be
healed structures.
It's not the people were
dying as a result of this.
And so it may be more that there
was a sort of ritual conflict
warfare process
going on, which is
very common in these types of
societies, where people would
fight some battles,
and they would hit
each other over the
head, not to kill them,
but as part of these
ritual practices.
So probably, it wasn't as
peaceful as one imagines.
But we're doing more work on
trying to understand that.
But certainly, there
wasn't large-scale warfare,
or anything like that.
MALE SPEAKER: Well
with that, join me
in thanking Ian for sharing
the Neolithic story.
[APPLAUSE]
