The BIAA publishes scholarly monographs relating to the archaeology and history of Türkiye, with a particular emphasis on publishing the results of Institute-funded research. BIAA monographs are distributed by Oxbow Books through whom orders should be made.
The BIAA on occasion publishes online supplementary material to books in its monograph series. All supplementary material is open access, and is available here.
These volumes are three of four reporting on the main excavations of Neolithic Çatalhöyük East from 2009 to 2017, with volume 12 to follow in the coming months. Çatalhöyük is well known because of its large size, elaborate symbolism and wall paintings, and long history of excavation. The volumes cover the last period of excavation directed by Ian Hodder, but many contributors also take the chance to summarise and compare results over the 25-year span of the Çatalhöyük Research Project.
This volume scrutinises Çatalhöyük as the by-product of the activities of a community residing in central Türkiye 9,000 years ago, but also as the outcome of the interactions of a community of researchers with wide-ranging theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. The diversity of themes discussed in this volume captures the multifaceted nature of Çatalhöyük.
The chapters in this volume describe the material artefacts recovered from the site, including a range of clay-based objects (ceramics, clay balls, tokens, figurines) as well as those made of stone, shell and textile. There is discussion of the entanglements between humans and their material worlds at various scales, from the overall use of the landscape around the site, to the arrangement of buildings on the site, and to the social lives of the inhabitants of the mounds. These entanglements involved human relations with moving matter. Matter itself is unstable and always changing, drawing humans into its care and management. We envisage matter as a series of flows or lines of energy that interact, animate or constrain each other, leading to change. This perspective, discussed in a synthetic introductory chapter, allows new approaches to themes such as local and regional exchange, community building, cooking, the organisation of production, and inequality.
The chapters in this volume report on the ways in which humans engaged in their material and biotic environments, using a wide range of archaeological evidence. The volume also summarises work on the skeletal remains recovered from the site, as well as analytical research on isotopes and aDNA. There is discussion of how our understanding of the Neolithic landscape and climate have changed. There is important new data on the ways the landscape was used differently by different social groups in the settlement. Social structure seems much more complex and cross-cutting than previously thought, and practices of delayed burial have been discovered. A strong emphasis throughout the volume is on variability and on transformation through time; the ways that the landscape was ‘peopled’ changed quite dramatically as a result of both internal developments and external large-scale processes.
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