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 four volumes report on the main excavations of Neolithic Çatalhöyük East from 2009 to 2017. 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 presents the results of the excavations that took place at Çatalhöyük from 2009 to 2017, when the main aim was to understand the social geography of the settlement, its layout and social organisation. Excavation, recording and sampling methodologies are discussed, as well as dating, ‘levels’, and the grouping of buildings into social sectors. The excavations in different areas of the East Mound at Çatalhöyük are described. The description of excavated units, features and buildings incorporates results from the analyses of animal bone, chipped stone, groundstone, shell, ceramics, phytoliths and micromorphology. The integration of such data within their context allows detailed accounts of the lives of the inhabitants of Çatalhöyük, their relationships and activities. The integration of different types of data in the excavation account mimics the process of collaborative interpretation that took place during the excavation and post-excavation process.
This volume scrutinises Çatalhöyük as the by-product of the activities of a community residing there 9,000 years ago, but also as the outcome of the interactions of a community of researchers. It begins with an overview of community engagement practices and of the ways different audiences have interacted with the site. It considers the differences in approach of the Mellaart and recent excavations and reflects on different methodological perspectives. It synthesises the array of environmental resources that would have been used at different times of the year. The ways in which the community at Çatalhöyük was held together, but also how community dynamics may have changed over time, are considered. Modelling changes in practices shows that the effects of new introductions played out over many phases of occupation. The evidence for violence at the site is re-evaluated, and the use of pigments on house surfaces, objects and human bodies and the social practices surrounding these practices are considered. The diversity of themes discussed 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.
This volume reports 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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