The Leopard's Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük

I bought this book because I wanted to know about the famous archaeological dig at Catalhoyuk in Turkey, and my money was well spent. This is an excellent overview of the recent excavations on this giant Pre-Pottery Neolithic site which involves centuries of settlement, before the invention of writing. Ian Hodder's writing is eloquent, readable and restrained. He does not indulge in rampant theorizing about what these ancient people thought, felt or did. He presents the evidence with great specificity and discusses intelligently what we can infer from what is discovered. Hodder draws on other important books for insight, including studies of "modern" primitive tribes whose behavior might provide ways of assessing the materials found at Catalhoyuk. He presents all these related materials in rich context, and the documentation is excellent. ---- The book is rich is fascinating details. This is a world in which people buried their dead under the floors of the rooms in which they lived, and sometimes retrieved the skulls of the dead in order to decorate them with plaster and keep them for reasons that we may never fully comprehend. That floors and walls were polished, that people cooked with clay balls (which they heated in the fire and then put into liquids to warm them, or on which they laid out meat to cook it), that rooms were ornamented with bulls' heads, that entry was often through the roof, that wall paintings involve hunt scenes, and a special attention to leopards, that there are numerous deliberately decapitated figurines found in storage bins, or in flooring --- all of this and more makes very interesting reading. Of course there is discussion of the Mother Goddess, and the goddess figurines discovered at Catalhoyuk which have caused so much interest. ---- The many black and white photographs, drawings, and color plates do wonders. I'm finding out here just what I want to know. ----- Of course there are many other similar sites in the Near East; plastered skulls have been found at Jericho and in other ruins; but studying this one site in such depth one can gain a greater understanding of what has been reported from so many other places. ---- Supplementing this with Nicholas Wade's beautifully written Behind the Dawn provides a wonderful context for approaching the period. --- It's sad to me that this book is apparently out of print. I hope it is re-printed, and goes into paperback for a wider readership. It's an extremely fine work of scholarship. A very worthwhile addition to the library of any archaeology enthusiast. Highly recommended.

At last a comprehensive, readable account of the most recent archaeological work at Catalhoyuk. Ian Hodder gives us many beautiful pictures of artifacts as well as diagrams and charts that build a picture of what was found. Trying to avoid making assumptions based on our modern worldview, he carefully makes deductions from the data and builds up a picture of the inhabitants and what it must have been like to live there. As much as the "Goddess Community" would like to stay with earlier assumptions, the data does not support a female centered society or religion at the site. Instead a much more balanced and egalitarian life and spirituality seems to be attested to. The earlier images of powerful and dangerous wild animals that once were painted on cave walls are echoed and elaborated on the walls of the close-packed mud brick houses of Catalhoyuk. Their walls celebrated the power of the wild bull and boar even as their sustenance increasingly depended on domesticated sheep and goats and cultivated agricultural products. There have been no large public buildings or palaces found. The center of life and production appears to have been the individual home. The focus seems to have been the family and it's ancestors, many of whom are buried beneath platforms in the houses. Elders probably made decisions for the community. Houses were built atop their predecessors so that the site seems like a large layer cake. Families cooperated in caring for fields and flocks and for supplying wild animals for feasting. They had excellent sources of mud for bricks and plaster for their walls nearby and obtained obsidian for tools from sources 100 miles away. We are used to viewing the history of "Civilization" as based on the gaining of power by some and the subjugation of others. The "winners" celebrate their prowess in monuments built by the rest. This work shows that it wasn't always that way. The settlement at Catalhoyuk seems to connect to later Minoan Civilization as it is coming to light in excavations in Santorini. (See Unearthing Atlantis by Charles Pellegrino.) I recommend this book to anyone even remotely interested in the history and possibilities of humankind.

A fascinating archaeological site, looked at afresh -- but perhaps too much afresh. I recommend this interesting book for anyone interested in human prehistory. That said, I'll dwell on criticism: Hodder rides his "entanglement" hobby hard, with excess of repetitive, often convoluted, and empty abstractions, and with over-obvious verbal trappings of logical progression towards what we ultimately find to be a less-than-cogent inductive upshot. We read many times such introductory clauses as "We shall see...", "I will argue..." "As we have seen...", "As I have shown...", but in the end the case, which remains as vague as the language, seems anything but ironclad. The writer seems progressively to strain with ulterior intent to explain in the almost mystical language of "post-processualism" the phenomenon of the Neolithic revolution, at the expense of a more rationally devoted explication of Catalhoyuk itself, where the renewed excavations in fact have uncovered far less than Mellaart's digs, instead giving emphasis to ultra-detailed laboratory examinations of materials; we may recall here the words of Max Mallowan (paraphrased): Nowadays, archaeologists miss nothing, and in so doing they find nothing. "Nothing" is far too strong a word in characterizing the notable discoveries and keen observations made by the multidisciplinary team who have worked latterly at this site; however.... The reader finds himself conceptually entangled in sloppy language. In an early chapter Hodder speaks of "restrictions" that are "symbolic and practical" but also "contradictory and complex". Then he identifies "from the puzzle of these restrictions and interlinkings four spheres of activity which had some degree of separation but which also interweaved and intersected each other." The "spheres" are identified as "domestic production", "exchange", "ancestry", and "community", among which there were "tensions". Following this we arrive at a heading, "Spheres of Entanglement" (now our conceptual load has somehow to accommodate both "spheres of activity" and "spheres of entanglement"); and under this heading the author blandly writes that "THE [caps mine] spheres are comprised of groups of activities that involved sets of entanglements in social, material, productive, symbolic and other realms. They were webs of interests and engagements and rather different networks made up the different spheres." This I can only term a conceptual and nomenclatural tar-pit: future archaeologists might one day recover lost readers there. More particularly, amid constant discussion of symbolism, I find it quite odd that a wall painting that Mellaart unequivocally saw as an erupting volcano (Hasan Dag), combined with a quite plausible schematic town plan, is given no latitude by Hodder for symbolism, although he allows that it might be a chronicler's depiction of an actual event (contrary to some later interpretations of a leopard's skin and "geometric" art). When all other wall paintings, installations, and moldings etc. are seen as symbolic and ritualistic, why should we categorize this sole example differently? This anomaly is carried forward in Hodder's figure 83, an artist's reconstruction of youth burial associated with rather elaborated wall painting termed simply "geometric" by Hodder, but involving at least one quasi-volcanic form, complete (to my eye) with stylized ash cloud and ash or lava flows, as in Mellaart's volcano-and-town. (The reconstruction artist himself recently informed me that this image is dubious, at best, since the original painting was quite fragmentary; in which case, then, its inclusion in the book is perhaps unwarranted.) It seems impossible, does it not, that primitive people so thoroughly "entangled" in symbolism and ritual would exclude from their mythology the sources of their revered obsidian, obviously associated with volcanic edifices, and even an active volcano; yet, Hodder strangely makes no mention of such possibility, though overall he is not reluctant to provide expansive interpretations. Sadly, in these and other ways "The Leopard's Tale" doesn't quite live up to the intrigue of its title. Nevertheless, I'm glad to own the book, and I've learned some very interesting things from it.

Catalhoyuk is an archaeological site in Anatolia in Turkey, where the remains of a "town" densely occupied from the Neolithic age (about 7500 BCE) though the Chalcolithic (early use of Copper, about 6000 BCE) have been excavated. What is remarkable about this site is the symbolic art that has been found there: Skulls of wild bulls and parts of other wild animals are plastered on to the walls of the houses, which are also decorated with many paintings of wild animal hunts; the human participants of these scenes often wear what look like leopard skins, and illustrations of leopards - usually in pairs - abound throughout the site. The book - written by the Director of Research at Catalhoyuk - is subtitled, perhaps ironically, "The Leopard's Tale", as hardly a trace of a leopard was found among the faunal remains at the site through many seasons of excavation. This contrast is one of many; the domestic animal remains found at the site were mainly sheep and goats, but no parts of these animals were ever plastered to the walls, nor do they find their way into the wall painting. Activities within the house were evidently carefully regulated and differentiated: People were buried under the floors of the houses; these burials were almost invariably close to the north and east walls of the house. Domestic activities - food preparation and cooking - were always carried out in the south part of the house, where the walls were undecorated. The floor areas within the house clearly demarcated these different areas - often with slightly different levels or raised edges, and with the use of different types and colors of flooring material. The author uses these and other recurrent patterns in the material remains at Catalhoyuk to develop a picture of the worldview of these ancient inhabitants - their social and economic life, the roles of men and women, and their spiritual concepts. This process - extrapolating from the material culture of prehistoric sites to the sociology, psychology and religion of the inhabitants - is known as Cognitive Archaeology. It is of course far more speculative than when dealing with more recent cultures, where written sources are available to supplement and provide context for the archaeological finds. However, as more and more prehistoric sites - from different parts of the world - are examined in this way, certain broad common themes are starting to emerge, enabling the field of cognitive archaeology to develop principles and disciplines of interpretation. A theme that the author returns to throughout the book is that of the relationship between the activities motivated by symbolic/ritualistic needs - like using a particular type of lime to plaster a floor of the house after a burial - and the social or domestic activities needed to support them - for example, cooperative arrangements with other households to locate the limestone and burn it. He calls this process "entanglement", and describes how one type of entanglement would catalyse another in a progressively more complex set of interactions between material, social and symbolic needs. Thus for example, the need to obtain the cooperation of others required some kind of reciprocal framework for regulating social relationships; this framework might be based on hunting symbolically important animals (like wild bulls) and sharing them in a feast. The bull skulls plastered to the walls of the house might well be the way of creating a historical record of the hunts and feasts, and determining the rank or prestige of the person or the family ancestor involved. (That both bull's skulls and human skulls were often dug up from a lower, i.e. earlier, level of occupation and relocated in the current house is evidence of their importance in family histories). In the final chapter, the author broadens the scope beyond the specifics of Catalhoyuk, and speculates how many of the progressive stages of early human civilization might have been driven by processes of entanglement - on a much broader scale and longer time horizon. Conventionally, it is presumed that the domestication of wild crops and animals in the early Neolithic caused people to settle down and live in one place in order to enjoy the benefits of domestication. Hodder believes that the domestication of crops was more likely to have been the inadvertent consequence of nomadic groups getting together for joint ritual and symbolic activities. (They harvested wild grasses as materials for making baskets, mats, shelters etc; this selected for varieties of grain which tended to keep their seed heads during harvesting, grains which do not automatically propagate in the wild). Hodder points to sites from a much earlier than the Neolithic - like Ohalo II south of the Sea of Galilee in Israel, which was occupied in the Paleolithic 20,000 years ago - which show clear signs of repeated if not continuous occupation, as evidence of the fact that early humans gathered together in fixed locations for reasons other than settling down to an agricultural lifestyle. Even if you don't go all the way with Hodder, the journey itself is very worthwhile. The descriptions and illustrations of the excavations at Catalhoyuk are superb, and the range of different disciplines and techniques involved - archaeobotanical analysis, radio carbon dating, micromorphological analysis of soils, isotopic analysis of bone, to name but a few - leave one in no doubt that every deduction about the lifestyles and culture of the inhabitants is based only on the most thorough and minute analysis of the material remains.

We take for granted that humanity lives in towns and cities, but there were no towns on Earth whatsoever before 12000 years B.P! The first town sprang up around the present Sea of Galilee as nomadic hunter-gatherers of the Epipaleolithic (Natufians) took bold action to survive a climate shock called Younger Dryas, where global temps dropped 8-10°C in a short span of 50 years, forcing nomad families to coalesce into larger groups of 2000-7000 people who built permanent settlements. The older Turkish settlement at Göbekli is odd compared to Çatalhöyük--mainly monuments in odd circles. Çatalhöyük is rectilinear with rooftops providing "streets". Prof. Hodder's title ("Leopards") is splash of colorful language without solid evidence (the "leopards" drawn on the walls might in fact be spotted dogs!). Nevertheless, a great read for those curious about human prehistory and about the techniques of archeology and INTERPRETATION of finds.

Ian Hodder has a real gift for conveying the immediacy of archeology and the issues that are involved in the local politics, assemblage and interpertation of this facinating site. Great photos. Enjoyable and illuminating reading.

I really enjoyed this book. Yes, it is dry and academic, but thats a plus in my opinion. I believe the author was very controlled and fair minded in his appraisal of Catalhoyuk. This becomes very apparent when agendas from a few social-political groups, good intentioned or not, have less than delicately attempted to co-opt Catalhoyuk. The author's patience is apparent, as well as his tact. It is really difficult to read any agenda he may have in this book. Again, I say good, because I won't be making any leaps into wishful thinking.

Written by a well-credentialed archeologist, this is a superb presentation on his many years of work at Catalhoyuk. Everything you might need to know about Catalhoyuk is in this book. You can trust the science here.