The Australian: James Mellaart - Molesting the past [February 25, 2006]

The Australian: Molesting the past [February 25, 2006]: "
Molesting the past
Frank Campbell
February 25, 2006
The Goddess and the Bull: Catalhoyuk - An Archeological Journey to the Dawn of Civilisation
By Michael Balter, Simon & Schuster, 400pp, $39.95

ARCHEOLOGY promises the earth. Where do humans come from? How do they relate to other apes? What is culture and when did it begin? When and where did civilisation begin and how did it evolve? Historical archeology, archeology of recent periods that have written or other records to confirm interpretation, is so much easier than prehistoric archeology. This book is about one of the most important prehistoric sites in the world. About 10,000 years old, Catalhoyuk today is a mound 20m high on the bleak Anatolian plateau, composed of hundreds of mudbrick houses covering an area of about 12ha, huge by neolithic standards. Population estimates range from 3500 to 8000. Every few years the inhabitants semi-demolished their houses and built anew on top of the old houses, thus preserving much of their past. The site was occupied for a thousand years.

Catalhoyuk was discovered in 1958 by British archeologist James Mellaart. He was banned from the site in 1965 in circumstances worthy of Agatha Christie, who herself worked on similar sites with her husband Max Mallowan in the 1920s. Treasures disappeared mysteriously. Mellaart now appears to have been the victim both of his own flair for publicity and the jealousies of Turkish academics who felt that their site was being colonised. It made no difference. The British still control the site, but Turkish sensitivities are now managed more diplomatically.

Archeologists dig up their own future. And there's the rub: their careers depend on what they find, how they interpret their finds and how others interpret them. Especially the latter. Careers are at stake. There are very few decent jobs. There's a nasty hierarchy to negotiate. The academics lord it over the specialists, who in turn dominate the excavators. These contract workers, many of whom are professional diggers, often know more about sites, objects and interpretation than either the generalist academics or quasi-scientific specialists. Managing these conflicts is always difficult. When there are a hundred people on site, as in Catalhoyuk, it can be a nightmare.

Archeologists dig up someone else's past, which means nothing but trouble. Present-day nation-states and ethnic groups usually have nothing to do with the extinct culture being investigated, but they still interfere. The Turks are recent arrivals in Anatolia compared with the Catalhoyuk culture, yet that doesn't stop the Turkish state exploiting the site for tourism and nationalist propaganda. From Wales to Australia to Jordan, the present molests the past for its own nefarious purposes.

If careerism and nationalism were all archeologists had to worry about, they'd be laughing and drinking instead of just drinking. The tragedy is that archeology has promised a grand narrative but can deliver only conjecture. The archeologist has no clothes. Certainly, technique has vastly improved. Stratigraphy, dating, palynology and so on have enabled archeologists to describe their sites with real precision. So let's look at what Catalhoyuk has given us: rectangular mud-brick houses, rooms, grain bins, fireplaces, pottery, tools, art on plastered walls, in-house burials, animal bones, bullhorns and lots of figurines.

That's about it. "Let the narrative begin," I hear you say. Alas, there is no story. There are many contradictory, competing hypotheses, of course, which metamorphose into theses, then into books and careers. The crippling truth is that these theories fail the acid test of science: they are in principle unverifiable. The meaning and relationship of objects and patterns found can scarcely move beyond the bare description of the empirical evidence.

Thus the famous figurines may or may not have had religious significance. Maybe they were toys, say some archeologists. Catalhoyuk is a magnet for new-age goddess cultists pining for a primeval matriarchy. Which is just so much Glastonbury fog. At the academic level too, the fat figurines (many apparently sexless) have been thrown about as evidence of matriarchy. In fact, the figurines prove nothing. Likewise the wall art, bullhorns and underfloor burials. The meaning of this culture has gone forever.

And the big picture just gets muddier. The conventional explanation of the neolithic revolution is that agriculture was invented and therefore urbanisation commenced. Today, because of accurate dating, "sedentism" is known to predate agriculture. Well, probably. Some of the time. No one has any idea why Catalhoyuk was founded, abandoned or how it relates to other sites. The schism between the swashbuckling speculations of alpha archeologists and the nerds who stick to the evidence is as wide as ever. Powerful forces are at work: speculation equals promotion. Visit the website www.catalhoyuk.com to see how modest archeologists can't generalise.

Michael Balter is an American science journalist based in Paris. He portrays the archeologists with as much detail, affection and interest as the site itself, which makes for an engaging and entertaining book.

Balter inadvertently illustrates the pointlessness of conjecture by outlining his own big narrative of the neolithic, no more testable than the official versions. He notes just one stark admission by an archeologist on the limitations of prehistoric archeology: "[it] will always be our own fiction.""