Catalhoyuk: Images, Symbols, and Reality.

(The following will make more sense if read after my first ever Update -- Catalhoyuk Reflections.)

Having read Ian Hodder's Catalhoyuk: the leopard's tale, I at first perceived my previous Update Catalhoyuk reflections to be somewhat naive and embarrassing, but nevertheless decided not to allow this feeling to prevent further comment. Of course it reveals my ignorance about archaeological findings on the Neolithic but the fuller information in Hodder's book should allow refinement of understanding around the imagery. It also confirms the impression of how the hominin psyche of the investigator with its cultural and personal impressions affects the work; exactly what Hodder has been concerned about in bringing in greater awareness about the symbolic meaning of material remains. In his work he brings in many disciplines but as with the study of human evolution the findings of psychotherapists, the ethologists of the human psyche, are not included.

I'll start where I started before with the vulture beaks embedded in "breasts". There was one illustration of what Hodder calls protuberances and one of my questions was answered: the beaks and other items (the jaws of wild boars, weasels and foxes, vulture and weasel skulls) were concealed within the plaster. The vulture and wild boar items I relate to rejecting mother/object while the weasel and fox items relate to the rejected infant/anti-libidinal ego. The fuller information shows that both sides of the internal schizoid conflict are symbolically represented in the physical reality and paradoxically this lessens the sense of stress that I get from it.

The illustration shows a row of hand paintings below the row of protuberances on the wall. When James Mellaart removed the protuberances he discovered that the lower jaws of wild boars were set within them. There is no discussion relating to the illustration, the word breast has disappeared. From my point of view the new information of the jaws of wild boars, weasels, and foxes in what I consider to be representations of breasts, though probably unconscious ones adds information to my previous discussion of mothers under stress (see Update Catalhoyuk Reflections). Hodder lumps these together as the dangerous parts of animals with horns which are installed but not usually concealed. But weasels and foxes are small animals, not very seriously dangerous; I am reminded of kittens and puppies representing their baby selves in the images of my clients. The row of painted hands beneath the protuberances reminds me irresistibly of babies? hands reaching for the breast, reaching for something needed that could be dangerous, the good breast that could become the bad breast. The use of fox and weasel shows the identification, or rather that merged state, the symbiotic unity of mother and infant experienced by both.

Hodder makes great play with the sense of things hidden and revealed as an important process in the cultural symbolism of the people. It makes me remember something that the anthropologist Marshall Thomas put in a novel that she wrote about Palaeolithic peoples: one of the characters states something to the effect that "the things of women, lineages and sexual parts, are hidden; the things of men are visible and obvious". Her novel of course was based to a great extent on her knowledge of tribal people and I think if one takes this idea and applies it Catalhoyuk provides useful insights. Hodder never calls protuberances breasts and of course they do not resemble them, especially in their firm and indeed aggressive erectness. Looking at them in a Freudian way I would call them almost phallic breasts. Whether the people who created those installations were conscious of any connection with breasts is of course irrelevant, I am talking of the hominin psyche here.

I'll continue with the hidden -- bodies buried under the floor, caches of obsidian hidden usually near the hearth and wall paintings and reliefs painted over and repainted.

Working on the assumption that the hearth area was essentially the women's domain leads me to the conviction that the buried obsidian belonged to the women. This is also influenced by the black colour which brings to mind images of the anti-libidinal produced by my clients (see chapter 4). Associations of devouring mother, Kali, rejecting object etc lead to speculation that control of obsidian lay with older women. One imagined scenario would be that obsidian, obtained by men, was part of the bride price, dowry, or some such exchange but then became "hidden" to be brought out and into play as it were on appropriate occasions: the birth of a child, coming-of-age, ceremonial event or what have you. The burial of infants in the hearth area ties in ideas of this as the woman's area and perhaps with ideas of rebirth.

Danger: a defining issue in my opinion, but treated by Hodder as if it was more symbolic than real. The leopard is noted as a dangerous animal, some information is given such as it is an ambush predator and goes for prey of 70 lbs weight or less, it is called a rival as a hunter but no account is taken of it as a danger to human beings. The fact that it is a major predator on primates is not mentioned. At the end of the book he talks about the absence of leopard bones from the site, something which he has already discussed as being a "restriction" of major significance, in relation to their meat not having been eaten or being part of the "feasting"/hunting/ceremonial life. It is considered as a possible food item because the people could not waste such a large carcass! I have never come across any culture where predators are routinely eaten, (although I suppose it might be as part of some magic ritual) and I understand that the flesh of meat eaters is very foul tasting (I think dog meat is eaten in China but half feral dogs are more omnivorous). It does not occur to him that leopard skins may not have been brought onto the site and that is why no small bones were found. (See Catalhoyuk reflections) His reconstructions show people wearing leopard skins inside the dwellings but there is no evidence for that. A figurine so clothed proves nothing, major ceremonies, like the bull baiting, could have happened at quite a distance.

Let me give a modern comparison to clarify my argument about danger. The car is a necessary, desirable, and highly visible, and ubiquitous danger that has moulded the structure of our environment. In a built-up area it is hardly possible to avoid seeing every moment some artefact or structure designed to manage the danger -- traffic lights, zebra crossings, what have you. Paedophiles are rare, hidden, and far more terrifying dangers for mothers that may affect their behaviour towards their children in more destructive ways such as keeping them close and restricting the freedom to play in ways that did not happen a generation ago.

In the Catalhoyuk house, which looks to me a very uncomfortable kind of dwelling from the reconstruction in the book, the bull's horns looming over the inhabitants may be said to represent the very visible, desirable and quite controllable danger while the leopard embodies the rare, terrifying and unpredictable because hidden threat. I have already suggested in my previous Update that the close huddled construction of the village with access through the roofs was a defence against the second danger; they would be  BOOKMARK  educational reminders of the dangers reality outside the safety of the domestic setting. (Of course a modern dwelling has reminders in daily use to protect against predation -- locks, bolts etc -- the fact that the defended-against predators are usually males of our own species is neither here nor there.)

Holder discusses whether leopards were a reality in the lives of people or more a symbolic feature. Obviously this would change over time. My thought is that when the village came into being leopards would have been actually killing the occasional child or woman and that by the end, when settlement transferred to the nearby ?West mound I think, leopards had disappeared from the vicinity having been killed and otherwise discouraged over the centuries.

The paired leopards sculpted on several walls are said to represent balance. Why? There is evidence that they do not represent two sides of the same animal because the markings are different, and they do not represent male and female. But in more than one case they seem to be represented in conflict, front paws raised against each other. They might represent conflict or confrontation. My thought is that they represent some form of containment on the grounds of it takes one to fight one (perhaps the shaman as leopard confronting the real animal). Perhaps the leopard was much too dangerous to represent on its own and a danger had to be neutralised with an opposing leopard. That is not balance in the sense I think that Hodder meant it.

The sum up, Hodder displays the common inability to grasp the reality of human life before the time when the major predator on Homo sapiens was Homo sapiens and the "inferior" animals were the defining threat.

Words, like all symbols, evoke unconscious and maybe unintended meanings. Take the word "stairs".

"The author talks of stairs within the houses. The illustrations show a wooden plank construction very reminiscent of the open tread stairs in modern dwellings. This is a very technologically advanced feature for a Neolithic culture but no evidence is commented on in the text for this structure and no comment is made on its construction. It is something that could be moved when the position of the oven was changed and in the book The Goddess and the Bull the word ladder is used, as is the case the first one or two times the structure is mentioned in the present book. For someone so passionately interested in the house and who gives such interesting information about processes such as the plastering of the walls, this neglect of the ladder or stair seems very striking to me. Is there in fact no evidence other than was mention in the previous book, grooves in the floor where it rested? What is the evidence for the built-on outside stair shown in one reconstruction?"

The above is a paragraph from my preliminary notes on this book. It was followed a day or two later by ?

(I have checked in the book I cannot find any illustration of the stairs I talked about, there is one of a ladder, and a couple showing a log with stairs cut into it going up outside though in another case it is very unclear what sort of stair is in the reconstruction. It must be the use of the word "stairway" that built up in my mind this false picture, but it shows how in fact the use of a word does build up a false picture of the culture being described. The point at issue I have decided is whether it was possible to walk down facing outwards, or only facing inwards and using the hands; and in the same way to walk up without using hands. A ladder requires the use of hands as well as feet.)

The continual use of the word "stairs" unconsciously raises the impression of the degree of "civilisation" of the culture and gives I think a false impression of domestic life, in that carrying burdens into and out of the dwellings is significantly different if done via a ladder or a stairway.

Teasing is another word that I challenge; in my first notes I recorded --

"In relation to the paintings of bulls and stags surrounded by men the term "teasing" is the one first used and later in the book it is still used first in phrases like "teasing or baiting". It is difficult to imagine the actions depicted such as pulling the tail or the tongue of the wild animal in terms of teasing as such events must have ended with the death of the animal: that was the point, to supply food; it must have been dangerous for the men and intensely stressful for the beasts. The use of the word teasing seems a way to avoid all implications of cruelty; it shows I think an unconscious partisanship; a lack of objectivity which I think is inevitable. The director of the dig is "on the side of" the people he is studying."

Now I think I can bring in my modern example and suggests that one aspect of this baiting ceremony was analageous to the modern driving test: a proof of having learnt to master the danger.

The issue of cleaning and the dividing ridges separating clean platforms and so on becomes more complex than as I originally understood it. It is possible that babies and toddlers were restricted to some of the cleaner surfaces demarcated by those ridges but more likely that they were near their mothers in the "dirty" hearth area, although this was not filthy in the way that the courtyards of the Mesakin were. In all books of this author that I have read, when discussing clean and dirty areas the question of who actually cleans them is never addressed. This could have been looked at in the studies of modern cultures and this information would have been valuable, like other ethnoarchaeological information. The stress on the women of Catalhoyuk would result from the beginning of the double workload that is a normal part of a settled life for women. Those women had to work in the fields I'm sure and now had a full load of housework on top.

I recorded in my detailed page by page notes --

"The main room of the houses are divided up into small segments by the use of platforms, ridges, benches and pedestals. He states that moving around these rooms while digging forces the digger to be especially careful; there are bulls' horns sticking out from benches and walls and the ridges between platforms are often fragile. Bodily movement is channelled by the physical space so that it becomes habituated. It sounds incredibly schizoid." (controlling and rigidly compartmentalised) Hodder's description confirms my impression from his reconstruction illustrations that the dwellings were stressful to live in. Was the construction of demarcation lines partly concerned with impressing the juvenile, and perhaps female, occupants with the importance of keeping within safe boundaries when out in the dangerous world where living bulls etc might have been encountered -- not straying outside the field or garden or pasture site miles away from the town.

Hominin psyche rules okay!

One of my themes throughout my book Created in the Image and this site is how the unconscious influences everything we do and we cannot hold out against it. I attach in proof a paragraph from my first notes and then one from my page by page detailed notes:

"When talking of individual lives Hodder uses three examples, skeletons of elderly males.  BOOKMARK  The diagram of burials in the houses one and five clearly shows one of an old woman who could have been as good an example. His stance as an inclusive objective writer I think is blown apart by this suddenly sexist departure."

"Chapter 10: self, world and individuality.

Hodder talks of individual lives through three skeletons of long-lived individuals, all male, though there is a female skeleton older still. She gets a mention in passing as an old woman that the others might have known. So typical! Why is her life not chosen as one that could be imagined? Why must she be treated as all women are, having no significance except in relation to some man? With this one piece all Hodder's efforts to be inclusive and unprejudiced are blown apart. Only males are given the dignity of individual lives in that imaginative way.

You can see I got quite angry each time I thought about it but only for a moment, none of us can escape from what's been impressed in our formative first years.

"Hodder talks all the time in terms of restrictions, tensions, limitations and boundaries and this gives a schizoid feel to the culture he is describing but it's difficult to know whether some of that is more a projection from the author."

"He talks of the domestication of plants being a consequence of the large gatherings for feasting/ceremonial etc, a part of the hunting/spirit/status/ceremonial nexus. This is a part of the way in which female activity is subordinated or made dependent on male activity. If women domesticated plants they only did it because of men gathering together to hunt, feast and build each other's egos. My guess would be that domestication of plants happened because in an area of rich resources people would choose to settle longer in one place which they could make more secure, and the process would then be the same as Hodder assumed to follow from gathering for ceremonial reasons."

I must draw this to a conclusion, it's already taken me months to do this much and I'm running out of time. I shall add on the remains of my preliminary notes which I dictated a few days after finishing the book from memory and then my page by page notes which were done from my markers going through the book and include comments. I can see in a way of all I'm doing is the sort of work that if I'd been doing it 30 years ago would have been the basis for book on something like the psychology of civilisation. Well that won't happen any more than anyone reading this far, let alone notes, but having spent so much time on them I'll put them on the site anyway.

And immediately I realise that there is a topic I have forgotten -- the siting of the settlement. I shall transfer some paragraphs from my page by page notes. There are one or two peculiarities caused by Dragon's errors but I haven't the energy to deal with those and I can't remember exactly what I said anyway.

"Chapter 3 Mysterious Attraction

Hodder says the people who lived locally renowned bird sightings of leopards especially in the upland areas he says at the time of Catalhoyuk the likely compared to this for leopards would have been packs of Wolves and humans! The leopard would have roamed in areas with some tree cover on the flanks of the uplands and along watercourses. He describes the leopard as a rare animal while warning us not to make assumptions!

In trying to explain the siting of the town Hodder says presumably some farming must have gone on nearby and perhaps on hummocks in the marsh lands although the risk of flooding would have made these problematic. But some farming and some grazing must have taken place at a distance. This is very different from the previous information that farming happened at about 7 miles distance. The "presumably" suggests that Hodder needs to make this presumption in an attempt to explain the siting. I do not think that the people of pound could take the risk of wasting so much energy on crops that could be destroyed by flooding. Looking at the maps in the book powerfully reinforces my image of the town as being in a sense an island site moated by marshes. The author gives a lot of space to discussing why leopard bones were not found on the site he suggests they were met more rarely and further away from the site though noting that they could have come quite close among the trees along the river and in the neighbouring would be uplands and that they would have been encountered perhaps when people hunted the cattle nearby and the horses deer and pigs, but leopards do not in general hunt cattle and horses, they are to big.

Chapter 4 The Town

Hodder suggests that collective action they have been needed to protect the sheep and goats from predation by leopards which would have sought them out and in this paragraph seems to suggest that most of the fields and grazing were at a distance. He notes that leopards would be likely to seek out the sheep and goats but again no hint that people might be at risk.

He comments on the close packing of the houses and suggest that explanation is in terms of defence have little evidential basis and by this he seems to mean only defence against other human beings."

Checking again I've realised that there's important stuff at the end of my notes so I'll just move all from chapter 9 onwards here and leave the remnants at the end. It's the only way to bring this to any sort of conclusion. I shall post this today come what may Saturday 25th November

Chapter 9: Women and men, the old and the young

Hodder comments that the maternal instinct in leopards is strong and that mother and offspring may share kills and hunt together after the offspring is fully mature. Art works show leopardskins worn by men but also occasionally by women and statuettes to male and female with leopards. The reliefs of two leopards on the walls always show them of equal size so that they are not male and female.

Hodder uses an account of the Tikopia as an example of the genders sharing tasks fairly and equally, but he uses an account from a man and so I have doubts. Then always overestimate the amount of help they give in the home and I'm sure a male observer with overestimate the amount of work done by the men when observing this tribe. He notes that most of the actual cooking is left to the women but as if in compensation search an arduous details in the preparation such as grating taro and expressing coconut cream are specifically the charge of the men the physical strain involved is the most potent reason why these are not normally performed by women; on public occasions men and women can be seen around the oven. Taro and coconut cream are high value prestige foods, I think an actual time and motion study might show women as usual doing more of the work.

Burials: very few grave goods, beads found with both males and females, Mellaart noted boars' tusks necklaces with women, and mirrors. Hodder found "cosmetic sense" mainly with children

Hodder suggests isotope evidence suggests weaning started as late as 18 months of age. If mothers took infants with them to work in the fields until they could be left that makes sense, as in my suggestion that small children were left untended safe in the houses.

 BOOKMARK  class="MsoNormal">Burials of very young children are different from those of the old, they occur near the hearth. Hodder talks of concern about the death of very young children because of the need for labour etc. To me it seems that the evidence shows that the hearth is associated with women, variable there might have related to ideas of rebirth.

Chapter 11: changing material entanglements, and the "origins of agriculture".

Hodder suggests, following others, that people came together in large numbers originally for ritual and ceremonial purposes, and to form and control alliances. He talks about feasting and hunting but not as if the hunting was the principal cause of the gathering. It seems to me so much more likely that people originally came together because that helps them to gather resources that could not be so easily obtained by smaller groups (or of course because there were rich and reliable resources in the neighbourhood); ritual, ceremony, and alliances would all become necessary to manage such large gatherings and achieve the desired ends. Of course by the time of Catalhoyuk things would have altered as domesticated plants and animals were principal resources, but the principal dangers still came from wild nature.

His description of the way the sense of self increased and its relation to small changes his very interesting and fits with the effects of an increasingly schizoid, but not pathologically so, condition. When mothering is deficient in some way that child must fall back on its own resources in building its ego. To take one point that he makes from a study of 18th-century America -- people began to use individual plates instead of all using the communal one to eat from -- this development is dependent on increasing surplus wealth; producing a surplus always puts stress on women and so the spiral moves up a notch.

Hodder comments on the evolutionary advantages of flexible small-scale immediate sharing and reciprocity in Hunter gatherer groups with no long-term commitments as he sees it (though this does not tie in with my recollections of for example Australian aborigine society). He suggests that what he calls entanglements with material things appears to be of less evolutionary advantage because it is less flexible and requires greater investment of labour. He suggests people got involved with material things because it increased social connections and possibilities because Homo sapiens is so essentially social it got involved with material things in order to be more social. To me it seems that we are essentially social because that is of evolutionary advantage in terms of a measure of security, which is why apes and monkeys form groups. Security of access to resources is part of that. And so I reach my conclusion that the settled existence in a built environment of a village is principally a security measure and would have grown out of gatherings that formed for a larger scale and safer acquisition of difficult resources; there is much more to be obtained from the carcass of a large animal than its meat.

(It occurs to me that all these visible and hidden "dangerous" parts of animals reflected the reality outside the village that there were a lot of both visible and hidden dangers of a very real kind and that people especially children would need to be reminded of this fact which would recede somewhat in the safe domestic environment.)

Hodder gives again more space to explaining why change was very slow during the Palaeolithic; he does get eventually talking about the evolutionary disadvantage of change. He is still coming from the change-is-normal angle.

"It seems quite possible that people who had come together largely because of the benefits (prestige, exchange, status, control over resources) that this network allowed ended out "accidentally" domesticating plants and animals.

Sites such as Gobekli Tepe which have produced clear evidence for public ritual and the prowess-animal spirits-hunting-feasting networks were close to where domestication of eincorn wheat first occurred. He indicates that people have moved to the idea of domestication of plants being almost an evolutionary process rather than an intellectual one.

Hodder talks of the shift to harvesting with sickles: he suggests this was not due to pressure on land availability but to a wider entanglement, the use of the stalks of the wheat for baskets, mats and roofing etc. In a way he is making my point about resources are more than food. From animals the hides, hooves, guts etc would have their uses and in the same way once energy it was expended on plants like wheat it made sense to use every bit of the plant. He forgets I think the material things that existed before the settled existence. Hodder talks of codified rules inhibiting change. As an example bone tools were mainly made from particular parts of sheep and goat rather than hunted wild animals. Again it seems to me that people found the easiest or most effective thing to use one way to do things and went on doing that. What he calls the emphasis on continuity is just the normal way human beings act. Hodder points out that people had the ability to make and fire clay pots well before they actually started doing that. They made fired clay figurines. He suggests they were not yet ready with all the necessary entanglements in long-term social relations needed to do with the complexity of being a finding the time etc etc. I think it's just they were getting on perfectly well without clay pots and increasing population and complexity resulting from that eventually put pressure on for more efficient cooking methods which led to pottery. People change when pressure forces them to.

He talks of throughout the later Pleistocene and into the early Holocene we see increased sedentism and increased investment in ceremony. The hunting-feasting-prowess-ancestry network allowed or encouraged sedentism and agglomeration.

The evidence shows that women and fertility were not tied to the origins of agriculture but came on to the fore much later alongside what he calls the hunting/baiting symbolism as domestic production became more socially central; domestic cattle emerged by the time of the upper levels of the West mound.

Epilogue

One leopard bone was found at the site. Leopard claw and its context relate to the figure of the woman on a seat of felines; in the burial the woman is associated with a leopard claw that she wore while in the sculpture her hands rest on the heads of the large cats. The claw was a pendant found with a woman buried holding a plastered skull."

Last note: a touch of the negative bond to a rejecting, because stressed, mother is a source of empowerment for older women.

Preliminary notes -- the leopard's tale.

Other animals are labelled as dangerous, and having dangerous parts like horns, teeth and tusks, but again no account is given of the danger they actually represent either to human beings or their crops and livestock.

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A valuable list is given of the percentages of mammal bones and images, vultures and other birds are omitted and no information is given on quantity. How many images percentage wise are there of leopards and of vultures? No reference is made in the text to what I think it must be in the previous archaeologist in the 60s called breasts within bearded vulture beaks. There is one illustration where they are called protuberances. Is there a reason? Some of the information in the Engendering Archaeology book about Hodder had intimations of his schizoid condition. Some of the information about the social conditions in the "town" suggest, as I previously did, that condition but is some of that projection?

He talks always of limitations and restrictions such hands the restriction on bringing leopard bones onto the site.

Nothing said about other animal products such as glue made from hooves etc.

He sees feasting always in relation to ritual and ceremony and not in relation to hunting. By this I mean that the hunting of a large number of animals which requires a large number of people and so gaining a lot of meat and other products would be the principal motivation, and feasting and ceremony a natural follow-on.

The issue of people gathering together because they can collect resources more effectively that way, for example kill a larger number of wild cattle which of course would then be followed by feasting, does not seem part of the theory. Of course there are many other usable parts of a large animal like a wild bull -- a large hide, a large stomach which would be a useful container, hooves and tendons and so on.

Page by page notes from the book.

The table on page 9 shows percentages of representation of different mammals under the headings of paintings, reliefs, installations/deposits, and faunal remains; birds are omitted although there are paintings of vultures which are definitely significant and of course the vulture beaks in "protuberances" (as this author calls them) were the first thing that caught my attention in The Goddess and the Bull. The omission of any comparative figures for vultures prevents any comparison with the prevalence of leopard representations and the absence of leopard claws, to give an example of something given value in other cultures. Hedgehog, hare, wolf, dog, fox, bear, mustelid, wildcat, are all listed because they have a minimal representation in the faunal remains, all but the first two and last one are represented in installations/deposits. Leopards are represented at 65% in paintings 35% relief as zero otherwise; cattle are 1% of paintings 46% reliefs 54% of installations and 15% of faunal remains.

In discussing the leopard Hodder describes it as a competitor as a hunter and scavenger of a large prey , they would have been met and perhaps killed in order to protect the people's own food it is discussed as a large animal and as a food item! To the best of my knowledge the meat of carnivores is very foul tasting and not usually eaten in any culture. Hodder discusses the possibility that leopards were represented as myth and not encountered or killed in reality, or killed and skinned elsewhere. No discussion of it as a serious danger.

An illustration shows a row of hand paintings below a row of protuberances on the wall. When James Mellaart removed the protuberances he discovered that the lower jaws of wild boars were set within them. Opposite is an illustration of a stag being baited by men, there appears to be one female figure watching, some of the men appear to be wearing leopard skins, are pulling the stag's tongue and tail, the animal's penis is erect. The text at that point is about initiation ceremonies and theories about violence sex and death death and rebirth into new social structures such as an age group, dealing with constraint within settled life and so on. There is no discussion relating to the other illustration, the word breast has disappeared. From my point of view the new information of the jaws of wild boars, weasels, and foxes in what I consider to be representations of breasts, though probably unconscious ones adds information to my previous discussion of mothers under stress (see Update Catalhoyuk Reflections). Hodder lumps these together as the dangerous parts of animals with horns which are installed but not concealed usually. But weasels and foxes are small animals, possibly dangerous to babies but not very seriously; I am reminded of kittens and puppies representing their baby selves in the images of my clients. The row of painted hands beneath the protuberances reminds me irresistibly of babies? hands reaching for the breast, reaching for something needed that could be dangerous, the good breasts that could become the bad breast. The use of fox and weasel shows that identification or rather that merged state, the symbiotic unity of mother and infant experienced by both.

Chapter 2: a leopards puzzle.

Hodder emphasises the contrast between the focus on wild animals and often the dangerous or powerful parts of wild animals in the art and installation compared with the emphasis or dependence in the diet on domestic sheep and goats which are underrepresented in the art. The tasks and Amanda Bulls of wild boar and the antlers of dear are brought onto the site and used in installations. Port tasks are made into necklaces worn by women and some are later buried with individuals and the house platforms the presence of head and foot bones of dear and bore suggest that their skins were being used and brought onto the site but except for the earliest levels other post cranial bones of poor and deer are rare

birds there are few paintings of birds and few unambiguous bird figurines the vulture is the most commonly depicted bird but there are also cranes and perhaps another water bird . Part of the bird bones found most are from small or waterbirds such as geese and ducks in one paintings of vultures have human legs and could be interpreted as hybrid creatures or people dressed as vultures vultures are is shown pecking at headless corpses there is evidence of crane wings being used as part of a costume.

Hodder notes that things are brought into the house in Catalhoyuk which in previous sites were in public buildings such as burial or art motifs; there had so far been no public buildings discovered on the site. Earlier sites show evidence of a larger collectivities in the layout of houses into zones and of large-scale community feasting on a nearby earlier site.

"The degree of entanglement implied by all this is massive yet there is no reason to see this entanglement as without its own local fields and tensions in a distributed system even though everything is ultimately connected to everything else, there remain disconnects, faults and fissures. Thus there may be quite different sets of interest involved in maintaining the ancestors fear in comparison to the domestic productions fear one may be based on lineage and the passing down of right by Elders whereas exchange may be linked to social and economic relations that partly cut across ancestral ties and emphasis on constructing community ties may occur in group initiation  BOOKMARK  ceremonies in which wild animals are teased and then feasted on; such activities may be relatively unlinked to domestic production based on sheep and goat".

The large drawing of the town as imagined with people and others on the flat roofs and some pens for the sheep and goats against the outer walls shows ladders and notched logs against those outer walls. He notes that it is hard to call the settlement a town and as there is very little evidence of the functional specialisation and differentiation that would be expected; it is an aggregation of individual house holds and group action seems to have taken place away from the site.

Chapter 5 The House

a cutaway view of a house based on the findings from building one shows a man approaching the ladder leading down over the oven with a sack on his shoulder but the actual connection of the ladder with a floor is obscured by a partition and it looks very difficult to negotiate as it comes down in a corner he would have come down backwards so ended up facing into the room back to the wall across the oven there is an installation of Bulls Carl with horns on the wall facing into the room at what looks like thigh height. The houses were carefully cleaned before abandonment and dismantling. There were several types of cleaning when you use daily sweeping of the floors cleaning of floors and walls before replastering, which happened frequently and deposits in the midden areas that tied in with this.

Chapter 6 The Invention of History

Hodder provides several explanations for what he calls these remarkable degrees of continuity seen a Catalhoyuk. As I said before no real explanation is needed for continuity, it is a change that needs explaining.

Chapter 7: Revelation, Exchange and Production

Hodder describes the leopard as a secretive animal hunting by ambushing its prey usually at night and drags its prey into a secure place such as up a tree where it will not be disturbed. Secretive is a judgemental word. He goes on to talk about the whole of Catalhoyuk being about hiding and revealing, that in approaching it he would have no idea of the complexity inside the house is although you might see some bucrania on roofs, most of the time walls were plain white plaster only occasionally with geometrical or figurative paintings, and the leopard reliefs were often painted out. The skulls of vultures foxes and weasels were hidden in plaster protuberances.

There are claims of early communal storage of plant foods but mostly storage occurs in or relating to houses as was the case at Catalhoyuk.

Obsidian blades or pre-forms are buried in caches beneath the floor usually near the oven, neonates and young people are sometimes buried near the oven and the house entrance.

Chapter 8: Materiality, Art and Agency.

Involvement of leopards in the life of town -- there are several cases of humans in positions of control of leopards or big cats in "art works"., depictions of women and men standing by all sitting on leopards, big cats or other large animals. Hodder talks of the difficulty of taming leopards. Once again no comment on actual danger from leopards.

Hodder talks of things used as charms and for protection against the spirit world, he talks of increased concern regarding the death of young people as the society became more sedentry and there's people had larger numbers of children because of increased need for labour exchange and inheritance. Increased probability of social conflicts in larger and more dense settlements.

Luisa Williams suggests the walls seen as permeable, repeated plastering over of animal parts put in walls and sculptures as part of shamanistic practices around entry of, and keeping out of, spirits. He refers to the many cases of vulture beaks, boar tusks, fox and weasels teeth set into walls and repeatedly plastered over. The jaws and teeth of small predators suggests the teething baby. Vulture and boar items suggest rejecting mother so the walls contain references to both rejecting and rejected object.

After lives dangerous animals as the aurochs, leopard vulture, ram, stag, wild boar, weasel, fox, and bear. I suggest the weasel and fox not dangerous (to babies? not likely), but could have been useful preying on mice which were prolific on the site and must be the nuisance. Hodder all through the book is concerned about the concentration in the art on the wild with no reference to domesticated plants and animals. Seems incapable of relating this to the obvious fact that the wild was still a significant danger because today we are unable to see that. It was the sharp parts of wild animals that were mostly brought on-site. Wild goat horns were placed over a lentil bin. The wild protecting domestic.

"But lest we become too taken in by abstract theories, we can perhaps return to some very basic material considerations. At one level Bulls and other wild animals may simply be central to the art and the symbolism at Catalhoyuk because they are big, or powerful or dangerous".