RugNotes: City on Turkish plains a major draw for 'goddess tours'

RugNotes: City on Turkish plains a major draw for 'goddess tours': "Monday, April 18, 2005
City on Turkish plains a major draw for 'goddess tours'
Layers of clustered apartments hide artifacts of ancient urban life / City on Turkish plains a major draw for 'goddess tours': "Layers of clustered apartments hide artifacts of ancient urban life
City on Turkish plains a major draw for 'goddess tours'
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

Monday, April 18, 2005
In the long, long history of humanity's shift from tiny clans of hunter-gatherers to settled societies of crowded city dwellers, no step was more momentous than the emergence of the first clustered towns and the sophisticated cultures their inhabitants created.

Intriguing evidence of early urbanization is now emerging at one of the largest and most significant digs in the history of archaeology, a 26-acre site in Turkey's Anatolian plain known as Çatalhöyük.

There, two British-born archaeologists -- one now at Stanford and the other at UC Berkeley -- are leading more than 100 other scientists in unearthing layer after layer of the settlement's history, which began more than 9,000 years ago and vanished inexplicably only 1,200 years later.

The town grew to some 8,000 inhabitants who lived in more than 2,000 houses that were mostly all jammed together, with no streets between them and with access to the living spaces only through holes in the rooftops and down ladders of timber. Much of domestic life, it appears, went on among the rooftops, although ovens and sleeping benches and wall paintings of bulls, deer, vultures, and tiny human figurines were abundant in the living quarters below.

No one yet knows what impelled those Stone Age people to come together, for the settlement apparently began even before they started farming, and before cattle were domesticated. Nor does anyone yet know what or whom they worshiped, or what worldview their elaborate wall paintings of animals and hunters signified.

But because of the spectacular female clay figures that the archaeologists have found in the excavated layers over the years, Çatalhöyük has become a draw for modern believers who hold to the idea that the neolithic people were ruled by a matriarchy whose central figure was a mother goddess.

Travel agents offer "goddess tours" of the site; groups of women -- some feminist, some religious -- go there to dance, to sing together in spiritual community, and to draw inspiration from what they hold to be a place where mothers were paramount in benign peacekeeping.

But to Ian Hodder of Stanford and Ruth Tringham of Berkeley, who will lead the expedition's 11th season at Çatalhöyük this summer, the evidence questions the notion of a mother goddess and a matriarchal society -- and they are preparing now for what to them are more intriguing revelations.

In recent interviews, the two archaeologists described the latest discoveries by their teams -- and their own thoughts about the meaning of the artifacts they have found deep in the dig, where material has been dated as far back as 7500 B.C.

Çatalhöyük (Chah-tahl-HU-yook) was first excavated more than 45 years ago by a famed and controversial British archaeologist named James Mellaart, who came upon a huge, high mound of earth -- known as a tell -- near the ancient Seljuk Turkish city of Konya.

Mellaart uncovered layer upon layer of houses packed tightly against each other, with each successive urban cluster apparently abandoned only to be succeeded by another -- perhaps 18 times over the centuries, as the most recent excavations have shown.

Mellaart was banned from digging at the site by the Turkish government in 1964 after a mysterious affair in which he was suspected -- wrongly, he insisted -- of involvement in a still-unsolved case of lost or stolen treasure. It was not until 1993 that Hodder, then still in England and already world-renowned, took over the excavation with a commitment to work there for 25 years.

"We found some fabulous new stuff last season," Hodder said, as he described the dig at layers of houses nearly 70 feet deep. "There's another 'mother goddess' figurine, and an extraordinary skull coated with plaster, colored in red and cradled in the arms of a female skeleton.

"We still don't understand the skull's significance, but it may have indicated the veneration of an ancestor -- because the skull obviously had come from an even earlier time. Or perhaps it indicated that the people were linking generation to generation, or trying to create symbols of authority. Or they may have used the plaster to mimic putting flesh back on the skull to make it more real, more alive. We just don't know."

"The entire site is a fantastically complex beehive of small villages all clustered close together, but with houses at different layers built somewhat differently," said Tringham, who has excavated Stone Age settlements in Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavia and has led the Berkeley team at Çatalhöyük for the past eight years.

She still asks question after question:

"But who would have been living in those houses? Why did they move and build there? Why did those people settle in houses built one on top of the other over the centuries? Why did they bury their dead beneath their own floors? Did they create sacred places or ancestral places? And where did they go after a thousand years?

"These are questions we still can't answer, and the whole process of interpretation must often only be speculation until we dig more and find more, " Tringham said.

The name of the site means "forked mound" and refers to the east and west mounds of the tell -- but no one will ever know what the generations of people who lived there called it. These were neolithic people, and writing came thousands of years later, when Sumerian civilizations developed the first cuneiform scripts.

As Hodder put it recently in Scientific American, Çatalhöyük's inhabitants "had an impressive social organization, a rich religious life, a high level of technology (weaving, pottery, obsidian tools), and a genius for painting and sculpture."

Those Stone Age people apparently cultivated cereals and domesticated sheep, but they were not yet true farmers of varied crops, nor did they herd cattle. But they gathered wild plants and hunted wild cattle, pigs and horses, according to Hodder and Tringham.

Excitement over the possibility that goddess worship existed as long ago as the Stone Age brought wide attention and crowds of new visitors to the site after the team announced last year that a "robust female limestone figure" had been unearthed.

Although badly eroded, it clearly represented a woman's body -- and it was the first intact figurine that the expedition's teams had found since Mellaart discovered a far more dramatic statuette of a majestic woman seated on what might have been a throne with her arms resting on the heads of two animals that appeared to be leopards.

But Mellaart's mother goddess was found in a grain bin, and the Hodder team's 3-inch figurine was found amid trash left in a grave, suggesting they were something less than figures of worship or power.

Most of the human figures -- or fragments of human figures -- that have been found at Çatalhöyük appear sexless, Hodder said, although he agrees that female depictions do outnumber the males.

"I find it difficult to link all the figures and the wall paintings with the idea of a goddess," Hodder said. "I see them more as depictions of daily life, and our evidence so far doesn't suggest anything else."

Says Tringham: "Right now, the data from the human remains team on burial contexts and study of wear and tear on bones would indicate that men did not undertake hugely different tasks from women, nor did they receive markedly different social treatment."

The question has long provoked controversy, and Hodder said he maintains constant and extremely useful communication with the "goddess community," as he calls the believers whose questions and contradictions he finds both stimulating and meaningful to his own life.

The dig each year is populated by scientists with varied special disciplines from nations ranging from Britain, Poland, South Africa, Sweden, Israel and Iran. The project's modest annual budget is only $400,000, donated largely by organizations and individuals interested in archaeology, and Hodder says somewhat wistfully, "I do spend a lot of my time fund-raising."


Two Web sites hold updated details of all the expedition's activities and its history. One is the project's own at catalhoyuk.com, and the other is maintained by the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul at smm. org/catal/introduction/
E-mail David Perlman at dperlman@sfchronicle.com.""