The Leopard's Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük Paperback – October 10, 2011

Catalhoyuk is an archaeological site in Anatolia in Turkey, where the remains of a "town" densely occupied from the Neolithic age (about 7500 BCE) though the Chalcolithic (early use of Copper, about 6000 BCE) have been excavated. What is remarkable about this site is the symbolic art that has been found there: Skulls of wild bulls and parts of other wild animals are plastered on to the walls of the houses, which are also decorated with many paintings of wild animal hunts; the human participants of these scenes often wear what look like leopard skins, and illustrations of leopards - usually in pairs - abound throughout the site. The book - written by the Director of Research at Catalhoyuk - is subtitled, perhaps ironically, "The Leopard's Tale", as hardly a trace of a leopard was found among the faunal remains at the site through many seasons of excavation.This contrast is one of many; the domestic animal remains found at the site were mainly sheep and goats, but no parts of these animals were ever plastered to the walls, nor do they find their way into the wall painting. Activities within the house were evidently carefully regulated and differentiated: People were buried under the floors of the houses; these burials were almost invariably close to the north and east walls of the house. Domestic activities - food preparation and cooking - were always carried out in the south part of the house, where the walls were undecorated. The floor areas within the house clearly demarcated these different areas - often with slightly different levels or raised edges, and with the use of different types and colors of flooring material.The author uses these and other recurrent patterns in the material remains at Catalhoyuk to develop a picture of the worldview of these ancient inhabitants - their social and economic life, the roles of men and women, and their spiritual concepts. This process - extrapolating from the material culture of prehistoric sites to the sociology, psychology and religion of the inhabitants - is known as Cognitive Archaeology. It is of course far more speculative than when dealing with more recent cultures, where written sources are available to supplement and provide context for the archaeological finds. However, as more and more prehistoric sites - from different parts of the world - are examined in this way, certain broad common themes are starting to emerge, enabling the field of cognitive archaeology to develop principles and disciplines of interpretation.A theme that the author returns to throughout the book is that of the relationship between the activities motivated by symbolic/ritualistic needs - like using a particular type of lime to plaster a floor of the house after a burial - and the social or domestic activities needed to support them - for example, cooperative arrangements with other households to locate the limestone and burn it. He calls this process "entanglement", and describes how one type of entanglement would catalyse another in a progressively more complex set of interactions between material, social and symbolic needs. Thus for example, the need to obtain the cooperation of others required some kind of reciprocal framework for regulating social relationships; this framework might be based on hunting symbolically important animals (like wild bulls) and sharing them in a feast. The bull skulls plastered to the walls of the house might well be the way of creating a historical record of the hunts and feasts, and determining the rank or prestige of the person or the family ancestor involved. (That both bull's skulls and human skulls were often dug up from a lower, i.e. earlier, level of occupation and relocated in the current house is evidence of their importance in family histories).In the final chapter, the author broadens the scope beyond the specifics of Catalhoyuk, and speculates how many of the progressive stages of early human civilization might have been driven by processes of entanglement - on a much broader scale and longer time horizon. Conventionally, it is presumed that the domestication of wild crops and animals in the early Neolithic caused people to settle down and live in one place in order to enjoy the benefits of domestication. Hodder believes that the domestication of crops was more likely to have been the inadvertent consequence of nomadic groups getting together for joint ritual and symbolic activities. (They harvested wild grasses as materials for making baskets, mats, shelters etc; this selected for varieties of grain which tended to keep their seed heads during harvesting, grains which do not automatically propagate in the wild). Hodder points to sites from a much earlier than the Neolithic - like Ohalo II south of the Sea of Galilee in Israel, which was occupied in the Paleolithic 20,000 years ago - which show clear signs of repeated if not continuous occupation, as evidence of the fact that early humans gathered together in fixed locations for reasons other than settling down to an agricultural lifestyle.Even if you don't go all the way with Hodder, the journey itself is very worthwhile. The descriptions and illustrations of the excavations at Catalhoyuk are superb, and the range of different disciplines and techniques involved - archaeobotanical analysis, radio carbon dating, micromorphological analysis of soils, isotopic analysis of bone, to name but a few - leave one in no doubt that every deduction about the lifestyles and culture of the inhabitants is based only on the most thorough and minute analysis of the material remains.

I bought this book because I wanted to know about the famous archaeological dig at Catalhoyuk in Turkey, and my money was well spent. This is an excellent overview of the recent excavations on this giant Pre-Pottery Neolithic site which involves centuries of settlement, before the invention of writing. Ian Hodder's writing is eloquent, readable and restrained. He does not indulge in rampant theorizing about what these ancient people thought, felt or did. He presents the evidence with great specificity and discusses intelligently what we can infer from what is discovered. Hodder draws on other important books for insight, including studies of "modern" primitive tribes whose behavior might provide ways of assessing the materials found at Catalhoyuk. He presents all these related materials in rich context, and the documentation is excellent. ---- The book is rich is fascinating details. This is a world in which people buried their dead under the floors of the rooms in which they lived, and sometimes retrieved the skulls of the dead in order to decorate them with plaster and keep them for reasons that we may never fully comprehend. That floors and walls were polished, that people cooked with clay balls (which they heated in the fire and then put into liquids to warm them, or on which they laid out meat to cook it), that rooms were ornamented with bulls' heads, that entry was often through the roof, that wall paintings involve hunt scenes, and a special attention to leopards, that there are numerous deliberately decapitated figurines found in storage bins, or in flooring --- all of this and more makes very interesting reading. Of course there is discussion of the Mother Goddess, and the goddess figurines discovered at Catalhoyuk which have caused so much interest. ---- The many black and white photographs, drawings, and color plates do wonders. I'm finding out here just what I want to know. ----- Of course there are many other similar sites in the Near East; plastered skulls have been found at Jericho and in other ruins; but studying this one site in such depth one can gain a greater understanding of what has been reported from so many other places. ---- Supplementing this with Nicholas Wade's beautifully written Behind the Dawn provides a wonderful context for approaching the period. --- It's sad to me that this book is apparently out of print. I hope it is re-printed, and goes into paperback for a wider readership. It's an extremely fine work of scholarship. A very worthwhile addition to the library of any archaeology enthusiast. Highly recommended.

Narración de gran rigor científico que consigue mantener la amenidad.

The way in which Hodder employs "entanglement" as a way to understand the development of agriculture was an unexpected additional and very helpful aspect of reading this book.

A must have for anyone wanting a better understanding of this site. I'm and Archaeology student and have found it to be very useful.

An eye-opener, and has made Hodder's name. Now needs the next person to bring the excavation and conclusions up-to-date

one of the musts