Similarly, the notion that there were shrines has not panned out for two good reasons: 1) The house floors are remarkably well preserved because of the inhabitants habit of replastering the floors every few months, or at least every year. 2) This makes the new microscopic archeology methods particularly useful there, methods which Melaart did not have in the 60s. And these methods have shown that all the houses were occupied and lived in per houses. Some of them were more decorated than others, and some had more dead in the floors than others. But the significance of that, if any, is unknown. It is known that so far, inequalities in nutrition or wealth did not exist, and each house built their own and did things their way, not using specialists. So all that adds up to remarkable egalitarianism. Grave goods are very few, and the most endowed graves are the children’s. While Wason postulates inherited status, I go with Occam’s Razor and stay with the simplest explanation: perhaps these children were particularly loved.

As for C.H. being a ritual center, Wason says no such thing. He speculates that the town quarter dug up by Melaart may have been the neighborhood of the elite, but his argument falls flat in the face of the fact that some researcher tested the bones and found that they were all heavily stressed, saying all these people worked very hard, carrying heavy loads up and down hills. As for being a healing center, this seems to me unlikely for a stinky town in the middle of marshes where more than a third of the population had malaria. He also discusses the possibility that it was a trading hub, but seems ambivalent about that.

In any case, Hodder said that he is planning now to move much faster, and instead of doing minute studies of only a few houses, he will move in a larger swath to get more idea of what the whole town was like. They have done some fancy-fangled xrays of the ground and say there is no large architecture, no public spaces. I am sure there will be surprises. But so far, there is no evidence for this being a ceremonial center, and there is a great deal of evidence for a profoundly egalitarian, though very strange, town.

What I have been wondering about is this, though: Hodder never makes a good argument that it was an agricultural town. It is basically assumed; but many things speak against it. The cattle were wild. The art never represents ag activities. The sheep and goats they ate most often, well there is evidence they were penned and kept for some time, but wild and domesticated sheep from that time are very hard to tell apart, and they could have just corralled them for a time after a drive. Even so, the space to house animals permanently for each household seems to be lacking. As for ag implements, they seem missing. They had grain (and querns), but was it really domesticated? Same with legumes. They had no nearby land on which to have fields, they are said to have walked 7 miles out for that. Huh? How would they have protected their fields from the trampling and pilfering beasts? Maybe there were some gardens on the nearby areas that flooded every year. It all seems kinda fishy to me. More likely these people were relying on the marshes and river to provide their food, along with hunts and foraging and maybe incipient horticulture.

Say, on another topic, do you know a good source for Paleolithic longevity? I am tired of seeing the same crap over and over about how these people could expect to live only 30 years, and grandmothers were a new invention of the Upper Paleolithic, when in fact when you deduct child mortality, they were pretty long lived all along. Would really appreciate a pointer in the right direction.

As for the funerary customs, here is the picture at Catal Huyuk as described by Hodder: Some small minority of people were buried in the floors of the houses, mostly babies and young people. The number of bodies buried varies from house to house. One body was found thrown on a midden heap. The majority of dead folks were apparently exposed to the elements nearby (a trench was dug outside of C.H. and a mass of jumbled bones from many individuals was found). There are virtually no grave goods. I should also add that the bones of Catal Huyukers were examined for nutritionally privileged status which was not found.

What in this picture says “inequality” or “elites” to you?

As elite religion, the ancestors of particular, powerful family lineages were offered special shrines, rites, and rituals (often secret rituals open only to elite members) performed to ensure the continued fertility of the land. As popular religion, feasts (often on the occasion of the death of a lineage member) and other celebrations would typically be open to and shared with all tribal members and even to those of adjacent communities. (Rossano, 2005)

With more readily available sources, this page’s description of religious iconography at Catal Huyuk does not make the explicit connection, but given the evidence of the rise of an elite ancestor worship cult at the site discussed above, reviewing the descriptions of Catal Huyuk’s iconography certainly adds more fuel to the fire.

A number of Catal Huyuk shrines are obviously associated with a funerary cult, and there are many representations of death or funeral practices scattered throughout the city’s art. The vulture shrines at Catal Huyuk portray in eerie frescoes the excarnation practices wherein the dead were exposed, in open funeral houses of strange design, to the tearing beak of the griffin vulture, who stripped the skeleton of soft tissue. One painting shows a vulture with human legs, wings outspread over a tiny headless figure; it is the Goddess in her vulture epiphany, reclaiming what was always hers. The vulture is also found in the bull shrines, hidden in the clay breast.

• Dietler, M. (2001). Theorizing the feast: Rituals of consumption, commensural politics, and power in African contexts. In M. Dietler & B. Hayden (Eds.), Feasts (pp. 65-114). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
• Rossano, M.J. (2005). The religious mind and the evolution of religious forms. Presented at “Science and Religion: Global Perspectives”, June 4-8 2005, Philadelphia.
• Wason, P. (1994). The archeology of rank. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sorry if I have made an unwarranted assumption. In any case, I would very much like to hear what convinced you that the evidence points to a sacred city.

The evidence against it, as I understand it, is as follows: the town appears to be a collection of extended households, egalitarian and fully functional in terms of the usual domestic activity. The town somewhat emptied in the summer, indicating that the people were out foraging and herding etc. In the spring, the area was a flooded marsh and not suitable for pilgrims. There was another site, Gobekli Tepe, that was built as a ceremonial area, much earlier than Catal Huyuk, and reachable from there. I have looked into Catal Huyuk extensively, and remember an interview with Ian Hodder (the current principal investigator) where he was asked whether he thought there was evidence for this being a ceremonial center and he said he sees absolutely no such evidence. So far, it looks like Catal Huyuk was a place of intensive experimentation with mud house building and plastering, as well as plaster art, and with living at very close quarters.

I can understand annoyance given your assumptions, but the articles cited there do discuss the archaeological evidence from Catal Huyuk.

I confess to, er, some annoyance at your wording. If you haven’t looked at the direct evidence from that location, would it not be more honest to say that indirect evidence points a certain way? I hope you are keeping your mind open to what is _actually_ there, meaning at Catal Huyuk.

What evidence? What are your sources?

I haven’t studied Catal Huyuk in some time, but these make the case:

• Dietler, M. (2001). Theorizing the feast: Rituals of consumption, commensural politics, and power in African contexts. In M. Dietler & B. Hayden (Eds.), Feasts (pp. 65-114). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
• Wason, P. (1994). The archeology of rank. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

As to village size, I am thinking 60 for a hamlet, 100-200 for a small one, up to 500 for midrange, and up to 1000 for a large one. What bad things will happen if a village grows to say 500?

Well, looking to working examples, hunter-gatherer bands go from 5-30, horticultural villages usually have a few dozen people, and the capitals of chiefdoms usually top out at around 150. Pushing a settlement much past 150 pushes you past Dunbar’s number; you have a society too overpopulated to run simply on consensus and community, requiring you to create elites and hierarchy, which immediately sets off a Prisoner’s Dilemma of ever-escalating energy and complexity needs.

The expansion of Tell Brak you cite reminds me of Rome’s formation from seven villages, actually, so I wouldn’t call that unprecedented. Certainly not the norm, but not unprecedented, either.

The Tell Brak evidence I mentioned before comes from this story, which says, in part:

Archaeologists have long believed that the world’s oldest cities lay along the fertile riverbanks of southern Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq. There, in a land of plenty, went the idea, powerful kings began coercing their subjects to live together some 6,000 years ago. Their great invention–the city–later spread throughout the Near East. But last August, Harvard University archaeologist Jason Ur and two British colleagues turned that idea on its head. Their intensive field survey and surface collection of potsherds at the site of Tell Brak in northern Syria revealed that an ancient city rose there at exactly the same time as urban centers first sprouted up in southern Mesopotamia, but followed a very different model of development. “Urbanism,” says Ur, “is not one brilliant idea that occurred one place and then diffused.”

Intriguingly, Tell Brak seems to have grown from the outside in. In the south, cities began as a central settlement–under a single authority–that grew outward. But Ur’s field survey shows that Tell Brak started as a central community ringed by smaller satellite settlements that expanded inward. “There isn’t a very tight control over these surrounding villages, at least at this beginning period,” says Ur. “So the assumption that we’re making is that people were coming in under their own volition.”

Urbanization at Tell Brak, Syria by Heather Pringle; Archaeology Magazine v 61 n 1 (Jan 08)