Shahina Farid

AbstractThis paper presents the results of interdisciplinary research on the recently excavated Building 52 at the Anatolian Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük. This building provides the richest combination of faunal, botanical, and lithic assemblages of all those uncovered since work at the site was renewed in 1995. Occupation of the building ended with a high-temperature fire, after which a portion of it was emptied and reoccupied.Our research synthesizes numerous data sets in order to describe the house and its sequence of incineration, modification, and reuse. Particular attention is paid to the intentionality of the burning and its interpretive implications. These data contribute to ongoing archaeological discussions of the nature of house abandonment and the intersection of ritual and domestic lift in early agricultural societies.

The corpus of figurines from Çatalhöyük has attracted the attention of diverse audiences but there has been an overwhelming focus on a selection of female figurines, many of which lack exact provenience. Excavation from 1961 to 1965 yielded more mundane examples classifiable as anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and abbreviated forms. New work attempts to balance the picture through various methods and strategies. The research presented here collates the artefacts from these early seasons with those retrieved from 1993 to 2006 to gain a fuller understanding of figurine practice. The figurines almost exclusively represent secondary deposition. We can now assess the number and type of figurines deposited in buildings, middens, burials and elsewhere. Reassessment of the entire corpus has prompted interrogation of the category of ‘figurine’ and reconsideration of the taxonomies along with other artefacts and image production at Çatalhöyük. Depositional practices at the site suggest processes of mobility and circulation that have rarely been considered in studies of figurines. Typical ‘representational’ or aesthetic approaches imply that the figurines were a special category with particular values of religiosity and gender; but attention to the archaeological context can imply meaning from the material practices within which ‘figurines’ were enmeshed.

The scholarly quest for the origins of metallurgy has focused on a broad region from the Balkans to Central Asia, with different scholars advocating a single origin and multiple origins, respectively. One particular find has been controversially discussed as the potentially earliest known example of copper smelting in western Eurasia, a copper ‘slag’ piece from the Late Neolithic to Chalcolithic site of Catal-hoyuk in central Turkey. Here we present a new assessment of metal making at Çatalhöyük based on the re-analysis of minerals, mineral artefacts and high-temperature materials excavated in the 1960s by J. Mellaart and first analysed by Neuninger, Pittioni and Siegl in 1964. This paper focuses on copper-based minerals, the alleged piece of metallurgical slag, and copper metal beads, and their contextual relationship to each other. It is based on new microstructural, compositional and isotopic analyses, and a careful re-examination of the fieldwork documentation and analytical data related to the c. 8500 years old high-temperature debris at Çatalhöyük. We re-interpret the sample identified earlier as metallurgical slag as incidentally fired green pigment, which was originally deposited in a burial and later affected by a destructive fire that also charred the bones of the interred body. We also re-confirm the contemporary metal beads as made from native metal. Our results provide a new and conclusive explanation of the previously contentious find, and reposition Çatalhöyük in a new narrative of the multiple origins of metallurgy in the Old World.

This study tests whether accurate dating by AMS radiocarbon wiggle-matching short tree-ring series (c. 30 annual rings) in the period after AD 1510 can be achieved routinely. Such an approach has proved problematic for some intervals in the period AD 1160–1541 (Bayliss et al., 2017), which are before single-year calibration data are available (Stuiver, 1993). We suggest that such calibration data are essential if this approach is to be employed for the informed conservation of standing buildings.

For the project this was akin to a homecoming as the history of the Çatalhöyük excavations

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The cosmogenic production and nuclear decay of radiocarbon, at the heart of so many of the chronologies, inescapably force people into 'the stochastic world of capricious electrons'. This chapter highlights the five lines of evidence: stratigraphy; chrono-typology; seriation; spatial associations; and scientific dating. In producing archaeological chronologies, Bayesian statistics provide an explicit, probabilistic method for estimating the dates when events happened in the past and for quantifying the uncertainties of these estimated dates. In the view many archaeological opinions are held on a qualitative scale. Chrono-typologies aim to provide a classification and relative sequence of artefacts, based on the progressive development of traits. Seriation is a process of ordering closed assemblages of archaeological material, most usually artefact types in graves or pits, or decorative or other traits on objects. The construction and comparison of alternative models are a fundamental part of Bayesian statistical modelling. The timescape study involved the combination of multiple site-based models across a finite region.

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The Neolithic site of Catalhoyuk, currently directed by Ian Hodder from Stanford University was discovered during a survey in November of 1958. The site highlighted an area covering 32 acres of space on the Turkish Konya plain and the first series of excavations, headed by James Mellaart produced a wealth of archaeological material. One of its many famous features consisted of well-preserved wall paintings spread throughout ten differing layers of habitation that provided an exciting insight into both the culture of its Neolithic inhabitants and on a wider scale, the emergence of human sedentary society. One of the many buildings uncovered in this series of excavations was a highly decorated level 5 structure, nicknamed the “Shrine of the Hunters”. It was found directly half way through the ten levels of occupation that spanned the site and in total it had four separate painted murals, spread across the entirety of the room. This made it one of the most ornate areas found to date at the site. For over forty years a true representation for this series of paintings had not been undertaken until the summer of 2010, when MSc Student Grant Cox in conjunction with the Archaeological Computing Research Group at Southampton began to develop reconstructions to place the artwork into a virtual context. Achieving this ambition was important visually and analytically because it enabled alternative interpretations to be developed and the wider space to be explored.

During 1993, the London‐Bahrain Archaeological Expedition conducted a fourth season of excavations at the early second millennium settlement of Saar, Bahrain. A lower level of the temple was cleared, and a range of buildings to its north‐west discovered. A new street was found opposite the temple entrance, and several of the buildings along the main street were further investigated. Further environmental research included a new programme of micromorphology and the start of research into the fish remains.

Funerary and votive monuments in Graeco-Roman Cilicia: Hellenistic, Roman and early Byzantine examples in the museums of Mersin and Alanya Ergün Laflı 181 Fortresses of the Tur Abdin and the confrontation between Rome and Persia Anthony Comfort

The long‐term aim of the project is to excavate the entire central area of the Dilmun settlement. During the 1994 and 1995 seasons a further twelve buildings were excavated, most of them located along the main arteries of the settlement. A resistivity survey, followed by selective excavation, determined the size and extent of the site. A well excavated on the eastern flank provided valuable information about the level of Bahrain's aquifers in the Early Dilmun period.

This is the first in a series of articles to appear in Archaeology International highlighting the Institute of Archaeology’s involvement in the Catalhoyuk Research Project. In this first piece, the Institute’s teams are introduced and their research areas briefly outlined, with the aim of showing the range of work that Institute researchers and students undertake. Future issues of Archaeology InternationaI will provide a forum for individual teams to expand on their results from Catalhoyuk.

Summary In late 1996 and early 1997 an archaeological evaluation and subsequent excavation was undertaken on a site at North Street and George Street, Barking by Pre-Construct Archaeology (Fig. 1). Evidence of human activity from 750 AD to the present was recovered. The most significant feature excavated was an apparent property boundary established c. 850-1050, running east-west across the site at a right angle to North Street, and suggesting that the latter may have been in existence by the Late Anglo Saxon period. The association of this feature with evidence of low-status domestic occupation, and its location 280m north-east of the probable precinct of the medieval Abbey, may indicate the existence of a secular settlement, contemporary with the Anglo Saxon Abbey complex.