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Transcript
· What is Çatalhöyük?
0:03 · chattar is an enormous archaeological site in Turkey uh in Middle sort of
0:10 · South turkey and what's called the cona plain uh not far from the town Big Town
0:16 · of of Kana uh it's probably one of the most important archaeological sites in
0:22 · the world and when people talk about archaeological sites in Turkey they
0:27 · think first and foremost of geke um but uh chleh is important for another
0:34 · reason uh in in in chutle Hook we get to focus on on people what people we're up
0:39 · to the focus at G has been so much about um uh uh temples and uh the origins of
0:48 · civilization and uh and that kind of thing but uh chattle ho not so much
0:54 · temples houses agewise it's about 9 and a half thousand years ago
1:02 · um and people were living there for about 1500 years uh which in itself is quite uh
1:09 · remarkable settled in what was originally those Meandering uh River
1:15 · delta these plots of land Islands poking up out of the water so clearly they
1:21 · chose the biggest one to settle on we suppose in terms of it being um uh
1:26 · important from its size um um because it stands out for that reason as well you
1:32 · don't get uh settlements the size of of chatt O from a long time uh after the
1:40 · time it uh it fell out of disuse and people moved away from it you know I
1:47 · know we've said it more than once at different places but it's when you look at the density of this and you think
1:54 · that this is only a small part of what they've excavated you know there's the other Mound over the other side
2:00 · and it is only 5% you know what they've done is only 5% of the whole site you look at the density of that you can just
2:06 · get a sense quite how many thousands of people there were so it stands alone as
2:12 · far as we know uh at this time period which is what roughly
2:18 · 7,500 uh BC to 6,000 BC or thereabouts
2:24 · yes how long have the excavations been going on well originally uh James melet started a very long time ago it was
2:31 · taken over by in Hodder who was running the place uh over 25 years ago he was
2:37 · know he was actually excav head of excavations there for over 25 years I think uh so that's going to be over 30
2:45 · years ago now um and uh it's it's remarkable
2:51 · really when you consider the depth of it the tail is 21 M deep tails are pretty
2:59 · common things when we talk about middle and near East and and even when we get
3:04 · over into Greece and the Balkans but Tails as they're called arise when you
3:11 · get communities simply put they building uh building upon building upon building
3:18 · in the same way that we do now we know that if we Dig Down uh just take any average Town dig down and there's
3:24 · there's old Pavements and houses under your feet they're living in their houses and then they come to a it seems they
3:31 · come to a period where they uh go past their you cell by date if you like and
3:39 · instead of moving to somewhere else um they maybe raise to the ground or use
3:45 · the original foundations to to build on again or sometimes they don't raise to the ground and
3:51 · so it it takes an appreciation of uh the lengths of time involved but over time
3:59 · you get HS building up into these Mounds U which are pure archaeological
4:07 · Delight because a tale tells you a story Chad hoyuk is many layers it's about 18
4:14 · layers of houses that they've uh identified and uh we're digging down
4:19 · through 1,500 years of archaeology um uh
4:25 · it through not just through the depth of the site but as far as as they can through the breadth of the site as well
4:32 · which is why it's taken them so long to dig down that depth in such small uh
4:40 · localized areas people wonder why it takes so long to excavate these places but that's why going down that depth
4:47 · it's immense in if you had to go down uh into
· What were the houses like inside?
4:56 · one of the houses in chatle hoek um I don't know what it would remind you of
5:03 · because I mean the sense would be of being a little bit Subterranean the actual functions of houses is really
5:08 · interesting because people the houses themselves will access through the roof and you descend some wooden ladders and
5:16 · round about your feet you'd have to narrowly avoid the oven um maybe
5:21 · narrowly avoid an open open fire it sounds like they'd be open to the elements but um but actually the the top
5:29 · is thought to have had a sort of porch a cover and you wouldn't be too far away as you put your feet down to perhaps
5:36 · where um uh relatives may be buried under the under the floor there in the
5:43 · northern part of this room and then maybe back towards the southern end of
5:48 · the room as you turn around be more the domestic uh living area and maybe after one side there'd be another room for
5:55 · storage and that kind of thing the houses seem seem to have been
6:01 · compartmentalized I think that's the best way of putting it that uh that they seem to be more decorated in the north
6:08 · side of the house even though the houses are small uh the north was decorated burials were in the north so the so
6:15 · there there was this demarcation of perhaps something more special on the North side for whatever reason and the
6:23 · South Side more lived in if you're lucky and you going to um uh
6:30 · a particular house you may be treated to extraordinary uh murals as well
6:36 · intriguing that some houses were very decorated others weren't particularly decorated and it's impossible to
6:44 · say because we don't know whether it was a hierarchical system or an egalitarian
6:51 · system it's broadly thought that it was egalitarian but because we don't know for sure and there are no
6:59 · patterns in whether uh a more elaborate building a more decorated building was
7:06 · more special than any other it could have been that it was just Personal Taste because they took care took great
7:13 · care of um the walls certainly around the North End of the houses they were tended to be painted white or as near
7:21 · White as as possible and decorated with imagery in red ochre there seems to have
7:29 · been a Shrine of some sort in the corner of each uh each building uh sometimes
7:35 · they were marked out by you may have seen photographs of these um orox skulls
7:42 · or bull skulls with these massive uh antlers U marking off a corner of the
7:48 · building it's thought that this was a shrine um although that's not certain so
7:53 · the imagery is is is quite striking inside this is quite interesting now
8:01 · what's the context cuz this is a replica they actually excavated this here obviously
8:07 · it's in the museum in Anor now but they excavated this whole freeze so this is an accurate reproduction
8:16 · of people doing stuff people hunting people dancing people all
8:22 · sorts but but this guy with is it a net or is it a panel of some description in
8:28 · front of what the is that it's a pig I guess
8:35 · pig looks like this dude's got
8:43 · Boomerang few of them course maybe how light how dark it would be in there how
8:49 · it would be lit I I don't know how much light descends into these parts and how
8:55 · many how much time people would actually spend living in these rooms for that very reason um would you be living on
9:02 · the roof most of the time spending most of your time sort of semi Out outdoors on the roof would most of your
9:08 · activities be taking place on the roof um uh I don't know um I remember we
9:17 · descended down some proper stairs into the uh reproduction uh room at the visitor
9:24 · center at chattle ho and I think our breaths were pretty much taken away we we so uh Liz our um fixer as she
9:32 · descended the stairs she she said uh I want to live here wow I want to live
9:40 · here I want to live here don't know if I share that
9:47 · s um it looked all a bit pristine and clean I don't think that it looked quite
9:52 · as pristine and clean certainly in the southern end way back then
· Do we know what the societal structure was like at Çatalhöyük?
10:01 · uh in its way chatt Hoy is a surprisingly large community because
10:07 · there's when you look at surrounding excavations surrounding sites that have been found they're all very small and
10:14 · suddenly you have this uh this massive Community the population estimate has
10:21 · been placed at 8,000 and under or thereabouts the whole functioning of
10:28 · society chat is is in itself it's slightly enigmatic um because there's
10:34 · Clues but there's no in yourf face evidence so uh there's been a lot of
10:41 · debate about whether anything that size could have been egalitarian now a couple
10:46 · of so sociologists came along when it had been determined that the population size of of chutle H was 8,000 or
10:54 · thereabouts they said no not possible at all uh you can't have this many people living together unless there's a
11:00 · hierarchy to keep it that way um otherwise they'd be knocking Seven Bells out of each other the uh minimum number
11:07 · you could possibly maximum number you could possibly have uh would be 200 beyond that uh all hell's uh Breaks
11:16 · Loose you would think something of that size would only function if it was
11:21 · hierarchical but uh but there are various things that give Clues uh or seem to imply that uh it's itarian
11:30 · number one there have been no special buildings found
11:36 · yet um because again as a side bar you've got the thing that uh what only
11:43 · 5% uh of the total area available to archaeology has been uh excavated uh so
11:50 · they haven't found the larger rooms the uh the special rooms um that would speak
11:57 · to people gathering together or or having accommodate or holding accommodation for the Great and the good
12:05 · uh separate and away from uh the uh uh the populace no houses that are
12:12 · massively bigger than any others uh nothing that's decorated particularly
12:17 · more than any others or certainly in the houses that that are more
12:23 · decorated there are contradictory Clues when you find uh another house that's
12:28 · not decorated that seems to be more important in other ways to be fair a large amount of um uh uh ground
12:36 · penetrating radar survey has been undertaken and that just shows the similar pattern of the existing known
12:43 · houses repeating repeating repeating in a sort of North Basic North uh South
12:49 · orientation um but they seem to buy and large be very similar size rooms um and
12:57 · uh so the the jues out sort of but the
13:03 · received opinion in that this was an egalitarian society health and
13:09 · well-being is a is a marked thing at Chad as well because it seems that
13:15 · if there's huge levels of INF well huge levels there's about a 20% child
13:21 · mortality rate which is high you know that's a lot of children dying but it
13:28 · seems that if a child got to the age of about 10 then they're all right and there are lots of burials where the
13:35 · people have reached their 60s and 7s which for this period in history is you
13:41 · know that's quite impressive really they're clearly they're eating well and uh and and and that in itself is another
13:50 · indicator of of of a pretty peaceful environment people aren't uh aren't
13:56 · dying young because of violence and aggression various things that do point
14:02 · to it being egalitarian and and the biggest one is that they have found no
14:09 · instances of of excessive violence none of the bodies that they have
14:14 · excavated have been uh uh murdered there doesn't seem to have been interpersonal
14:21 · violence going on there's there's no arrows in anybody there's no knife
14:26 · wounds on bones that does have been some um blunt force trauma to the to the
14:33 · skull that's another another issue but the evidence isn't there for people fighting amongst themselves so what was
14:40 · it that was controlling this society and holding it together children weren't
14:45 · necessarily growing up with their biological families they've been able to work out from the burials and the relationship of the people in the
14:52 · burials to the people living in in the particular rooms is they're not
14:59 · necessarily directly related so in each household you've got a a genetic mix
15:05 · suggesting that at an early stage in their lives children have been fostered out into the community or to specific
15:13 · you know um other families that's really interesting because it means that if
15:19 · you're always nurturing other people's children and other people are nurturing
15:26 · your children then you're going to want that uh to remain a peaceful environment
15:32 · aren't you the the the fear of your children being in danger elsewhere in
15:37 · the city would be enough to keep everybody quite peaceful I would think whether that's a glue that holds can
15:45 · hold an egalitarian society together that's a that's a sort of that's a discussion for another
15:54 · time there are so many facets uh of the society which may seem to us quite alien
· What was their relationship to death?
16:04 · people were buried in the flaw of the houses and this isn't unusual you find
16:11 · it uh all over the world and you find it through time that people have often been
16:16 · buried in their houses in the whole of the excavation period of chutle hook um
16:22 · certainly during the last 30 years of excavation they've uh taken up uh R
16:29 · about 800 skeletons 800 remains of 800 people out of the floors uh some of the
16:36 · rooms uh didn't have any burials in them some did up to it seems one room had at
16:41 · least 62 uh burials in it until that You' achieved some kind of um
16:50 · maturity um I don't know what the rights of Passage in mid teens or something like that would have been but you'd have
16:57 · been less likely to have been buried in the northern area along with the uh yeah
17:03 · it seems that uh uh there's a a sort of siss CI citizen Hood level that needed
17:09 · to be achieved before you were recognized enough to be buried in that part of the the house otherwise you
17:16 · could probably probably be buried underneath the store cupboard uh as much
17:21 · as anywhere else I mean you don't get infants certainly don't in infants and young people buried in the northern part
17:27 · of their houses aside bar to that it seems that any Outsiders because of
17:33 · course they do the genetic studies of you know where people have come from that have been living at uh at chattle
17:39 · ho it seems that um Outsiders weren't afforded that luxury being buried in the
17:45 · northern quarters of a house they too were more likely to be buried underneath
17:50 · in other areas and in the storage rooms alongside the uh youngsters so there's
17:56 · some kind of citizenship going on here um you know whether you're on outside or
18:02 · or if you're too young to have passed the threshold burial underneath the
18:07 · floor uh seems odd to us um but also the
18:13 · fact that it seems that uh the bones that have come out of the ground out of these burials um are
18:22 · articulated are the bodies must have been put in whole which raises a few
18:27 · questions uh about hygiene smell it's not for nothing that graves are six feet
18:33 · in the ground I think there is some evidence to suggest otherwise that some
18:39 · of the bodies have been bundled in some way before they've been interred and may
18:44 · there may been a period of time quite a long period of time between death and interment so that
18:52 · means that it was an intact body when it went in the ground it's not uh as we've
18:58 · seen in different cultures for example where you have uh bodies left out to uh
19:05 · to rot or be pecked you know eaten Away by birds and animals before the bones are collated and brought in uh so the
19:13 · suggestion is that the bodies have been uh treated in some way were they being
19:18 · dried smoked whatever it might be uh somebody said there were there was a smoking treatment perhaps The Kipper I
19:25 · don't what does seem to be the case is that there are secondary burials so for
19:32 · example some uh some bodies whilst they might be articulated skeletons they
19:37 · might not be fully articulated there might be limbs missing limbs are not always all their heads certainly we've
19:45 · got quite a lot of headless bodies so things are being kept back as
19:51 · momentos uh within the family or within the the community and it seems being
19:57 · passed around as well and obviously we can't say why uh or over what period of
20:03 · time but they have been moved and reared and I think there's a suggestion
20:08 · sometimes as bones are in bundles for example I think one of the most fascinating things for me was they found
20:14 · a woman buried who was clutching a skull she was holding it to herself as if this
20:21 · was uh I mean my interpretation was it looks like it's a loved one this person
20:27 · was holding on to to the skull and the thing about that skull was they found that it had been plastered and paint
20:35 · applied to the plaster and replastered four times so basically
20:40 · putting an artificial face back on replacing the features of the deceased
20:47 · is the idea to uh uh have the person of the deceased persist in time through the
20:54 · plaster and the painting of a face and those kind of things um uh intriguing to
21:00 · say the least but certainly managing the dead and burying
21:06 · people together we don't know whether the people buried together were a
21:12 · community or were they strangers was it was it just uh we had did someone just
21:19 · knock on your door and say we've got someone else that needs burying have you got room in yours we don't know
· How many people lived there and how did they subsist?
21:29 · uh you the site is is Big the overall area uh that's been identified is a
21:36 · roughly 13 14 hectares um so that's about
21:42 · 35ish acres of land and uh that 21 M of
21:49 · of depth you can see that that's an awful lot of residential uh houses to be excavated we
21:56 · don't know if there are other sites like chattle hoik to be found yet in Anatolia
22:04 · or elsewhere uh certainly smaller sites um
22:09 · any number of those and from times before up to a thousand 1500 years
22:16 · before we get uh places like just up the road Bon Oak uh which is a small village
22:24 · 150 people yet that displays many of the similar uh um
22:30 · societal um Moors that traits that exhibited at chattle ho on a smaller
22:37 · scale still got burials under the floor you still got burials concentrated towards the Northern end of the um the
22:43 · Hut could almost call it a Proto City uh a large town where uh we don't know
22:49 · exactly how many people were living there but certainly it seems likely that it was thousands uh the upper estimates
22:57 · have been 8,000 lower estimates around 2,000 maybe but it's how people lived
23:03 · together being able to uh excavate how people were living uh that's the most important
23:10 · thing you know so often we find in uh in archaeological excavations that we find
23:17 · the signs of uh of what people did um
23:22 · particularly you when you come into Western Europe and you're looking at whether it's Stone circles or or or do
23:29 · that you have these structures that uh that people left behind but with very little clue as to anything about the
23:35 · people themselves and here at chattle Hayak what you have is people it's all about the people and how they were
23:42 · living when we visited chle ho one of our big takeaways of course was how
23:48 · phenomenal The Visitor Center was the brand new one we were actually the first people that uh were privileged enough to
23:56 · see the inside of it uh and I remember one big uh animated CGI diarama of the
24:04 · whole scene of of chat of the the town the town city Village whatever you call
24:10 · it uh on the on the mound and uh people working the fields around about uh you
24:18 · know the the semi- wild or the cereals Wheats emers whatever whatever they are
24:24 · one of the more recent discoveries of chattel hok was uh they found some
24:29 · uncooked dough uh uh with an oven uh
24:35 · which is fantastic really that so we know for a long time that uh that
24:41 · societies were were making breads flat breads um from uh Wild Grains um so it's
24:52 · to to see a situation where people are beginning to grow particular kinds of
24:57 · grains to make particular kinds of bread it seems that it was particularly fertile
25:05 · it's at the sort of uh sort of like a um
25:10 · it was surrounded by Wetland that was uh fed by uh two the Confluence of of Two
25:17 · Rivers uh I think there's certainly a sort of like a little mini Delta area
25:23 · there with islands and RI rivlets and and streams running through uh just a
25:30 · perfectly fertile environment that doesn't actually occur that often um
25:36 · where we've got a Confluence of uh qualiity of qual qualities of land that
25:42 · come together to a provide Wetland and and uh fertile soils for where you can
25:49 · uh manage your cereals but also um the the rivers for fish and and fowl and uh
25:59 · and and uh Lands Beyond for the hunting of game it's a very particular place
26:04 · these places are contingent upon very particular sets of circumstances for
26:10 · them to arise in these these
26:17 · places goes without saying that with an archaeological site that's been under
· What about the material culture?
26:23 · excavation for 30 years uh that there's a fair amount of material stuffff uh
26:31 · objects what's coming out of excavations what people left behind figurines uh
26:37 · tools there's the things you'd expect to find like obsidian blades obsidian was
26:43 · hugely important at chutle hook uh and particularly at chutle hook for for some
26:48 · reason um there seem to be hordes of obsidian um you know roughed out
26:55 · obsidian ready to be uh made into useful tools and so on and so forth uh so I
27:03 · don't know what that whether they were trading obsidian whether it was a sort of staging po point for uh trading in
27:10 · obsidian I'm not quite sure but chh there's a heck of a lot of the stuff and
27:17 · of course in terms of not just hordes but in finished tools as well of all shapes and sizes qus grinding Stones
27:25 · those sorts of things which speak to you know the kind of things that people were uh eating um we do have some pottery
27:35 · Ceramics uh that art was uh was quite impressive I think one of the most you
27:41 · know thing that people most want to read into I are the figurines and those uh
27:48 · little bits of sculpture that are are representational of of animals or of or
27:55 · of people uh there's one particular particularly striking figurine it's
28:00 · probably quite a familiar image when people think of chatal hoek and that's of the uh the large seated uh woman on
28:10 · what looks like a a throne that's what it looks like it could just be somebody sitting in an
28:16 · armchair but it looks like somebody's sitting on a throne some have said uh that it's a woman giving birth uh I say
28:25 · not so fast this this is a woman that that looks like she's in charge of the situation whatever it is uh and uh you
28:34 · know speaks to somebody in Authority because there aren't any uh corollary um
28:41 · uh figures of men in yet bearing in mind we're still only got
28:47 · 5% of the surface area excavated um but uh it speaks very much
28:54 · to a woman in the place of authority parts you know that's uh it's interesting when you're looking at the
29:01 · uh pre Pottery Neolithic that uh that we find an increasing number of
29:09 · pots it bothers me you know that uh they still call it ppnb don't they ppnb pre
29:18 · Pottery Neolithic Pottery so much for names little
29:24 · figurines of of animals that look like play things you know or they could be
29:30 · important objects for people to carry around who who knows but they look sort of you can imagine them being formed in
29:38 · the hand they've got that sort of rough sort of semi abstract form or abstracted
29:45 · form of the animal in question that uh it's like theyve been like I remember
29:50 · playing with plaster scene at school it was easy to make something like that in in your hands
· What did you takeaway from visiting Çatalhöyük?
30:01 · one of the most significant things for me was
30:06 · bricks bricks and and the thing is that bricks it's Game Changer that that you
30:12 · you look at a house pick any house anywhere and I'm talking about in this period of History where you're used to
30:19 · seeing mud Huts we see mud Huts uh or waterl and DB Huts all over the place where people are just uh coating the
30:26 · walls with u with plaster and that's fine but the thing about bricks as soon
30:32 · as you get clay bricks together it's modular you can do what you want you can make any shape you like and uh and the
30:41 · thing is that it means that you can you can almost have it on a an industrial scale that you could have people who are
30:48 · making bricks and uh and it it does give you a
30:53 · clearer idea or a clearer sense of why a city can develop in uh in so simple a
31:00 · way because everything's modular just add to it you can have such a
31:05 · comparatively small area containing an awful lot of people
31:12 · whereas if you're constricted to round W Andor
31:17 · houses or mud houses then there's only so many people you can get into an area it just changes how people can live
31:25 · together coming away from chutle hug and visiting the archaeological site seeing
31:32 · one area of the excavation seeing what the landscape is
31:39 · now and the breadth of it you know the con plane that's in and also seeing the
31:44 · The Visitor Center it's came away with a feeling of
31:51 · familiarity and yet it felt alien at the same time fam AR ity because as Liz said
32:00 · as she came down the stairs I could live here you know it's a perfectly habitable room given all you have you know the all
32:07 · you have in order to subsist and yet it seems there are little hints Here There
32:13 · and Everywhere of uh a society that behaves you know interacts with each other and holds itself together in quite
32:21 · an alien way that to what we're used to so that mix of uh familiarity and the
32:30 · unfamiliar and the you know almost alien in some ways uh that's what I I take
32:37 · away from
· What would you like them to find at Çatalhöyük?
32:42 · that I think when you consider that these extion have been going on for so
32:49 · long and they have only uncovered such a tiny percentage of the
32:57 · whole site and uh and the thing is that when you've got 20 M of depth of the tail site and
33:06 · they've they've gone over the rest of it with ground penetrating radar but ground penetrating radar only goes down about 3
33:12 · m uh so there could be an awful lot of stuff that's deeper into the earlier
33:19 · stages of the settlement and I have to say you know the the excavations are going on they are going to carry on for
33:26 · we don't know how long a very long time and I I would just love it if they found
33:34 · something somewhere in the middle of the city that was like the communal place
33:40 · this is where everybody came to party or or whatever just you know if they did
33:46 · find a communal place because the thing that gets me about it now is that from
33:51 · everything that's been uncovered it's just it's just people living people living people living
33:58 · there's no signs of downtime I think that's it that's what
34:05 · I'm I would really like to see maybe evidence for an hierarchy I'm not
34:11 · entirely convinced by the the um the the egalitarian completely egalitarian
34:18 · society I still think you need something even if it is an egalitarian society you
34:23 · can call it that you still need something to hold it together uh leaders always emerge in societies there
34:31 · there's very little mechanism by which you can prevent that if you've got a large number of people uh people either
34:40 · come for themselves or people push them forwards you know they feel oh we need a leader under these
34:47 · circumstances so uh you know open-minded completely um but I'd like them to find
34:53 · a special building and uh yeah and it' be a bit of a shock if they found a te
34:59 · wouldn't it