FAULTLINES

THE CONSTRUCTION OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AT ÇATALHÖYÜK IN 1996

Paper prepared for the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) Conference, Liverpool, 1996.

Spoken version

Note: (i)this not yet even a working draft of a paper: it is part of a process of ordering and shaping material towards a paper. Comments and contributions of all orders are actively solicited. Citation is absolutely not permissable without written author's permission.

(ii) special ackowledgement due to Gavin Lucas for his help in formulating some of the key ideas in this paper.

Introduction

On 29 August, 1996, Shahina Farid, supervisor of the Mellaart area of the Çatalhöyük excavation, drew the attention of the various teams and specialists conducting a tour of the progress of the excavation to three instances of faultlines on the east walls of spaces 106 and 108. Reflecting the earlier discussions of the excavators as they first uncovered these features, she speculated as to whether the faultlines were the result of an earthquake or of bricks slumping, possibly because they were still moist when removed from their moulds and first placed on the walls.

In much the same way as excavation uncovered these faultlines, so too does investigation of the Çatalhöyük project, i.e. of the various activities, methods and dynamics by means of which archaeological knowledge of Çatalhöyük around 6000 BC is produced, reveals interesting faultlines, the causes and implications of which this paper sets out to explore. Just as Farid drew the touring group's attention to the on-site discussions of these structural features as they emerged, so too does this paper explore the explanations offered by project participants of the project faultlines as they emerged. In so doing the paper seeks not simply to account for those faultlines, but to understand the recursive relations between them and the way in which features like the structural faultlines, are observed, discussed, affect and are turned into archaeological knowledge.

Methodology

This preliminary paper is based on a limited (one month) period of fieldwork, conducted in the middle of the 1996 excavation season. While two areas were cleared in 1995, and limited digging begun, the real work of excavation only commenced in the current season. In part, this limited endeavour serves as a pilot study to assess the feasibility and potential value of a longer term project on the production of archaeological knowledge conducted over an extended period of time and in greater depth.

The study was solicited by the Director of the Çatalhöyük Research Trust, Ian Hodder. As you heard in his paper he is concerned to develop greater self-reflexivity within archaeological theory and methodology. Indeed, since the late 1980s, considerable attention has been paid within archaeology to the recognition that archaeological practice is always socially and politically situated. Close empirical analyses of the conditions under which specific assumptions or forms of practice arise have begun to be undertaken. The Çatalhöyük excavation takes this in a new direction through exploration of what might constitute a post-processual field project. Effectively the challenge is to consider how greater reflexivity about the way in which archaeological knowledge has been produced in the past can inform, change and improve, or benefit, current practice. These points frame the Çatalhöyük project and underpin my study.

This challenge is currently also being taken up in other projects. On the basis of an examination of what she calls conventionalised narratives, Joan Gero, for example, argues that the "routinized accounting for field methodologies ultimately distorts what is done onsite." She goes on to suggest "developing alternative narratives for accounting for field practice, new (and yet largely untried) ways of revealing what was actually archaeologically undertaken, to produce greater insight into how knowledge is 'in fact' constructed and to emphasize the role of archaeologist as knowledge-producing agent." This present research project is similarly concerned with how archaeological knowledge is constructed, but more importantly also seeks to review how new and experimental methodologies, implemented in response to the recognition of the constructed nature of archaeological knowledge, work.

What does an explicity reflexive and interactive methodology facilitate, and what are its limitations, its sticking points and sites of abrasion? In short, what happens on an excavation where the idea of "objectivity" is not effortlessly invoked, where scientific procedures are constantly investigated for their poetics and politics, and where more, or at least as many, "brownie points" are gained for exposing an assumption as a "find"? How is knowledge produced by archaeologists occupied with post-processual concerns?

Once operationalised, this study quickly expanded its reflexive ambit from being an attempt by a non-archaeologist to document and analyse procedures and developments within the Çatalhöyük project, to a situation where occasions of interaction between this researcher and the archaeologists created conditions in which the archaeologists were able, and in some instances obliged, to reflect on their daily practices. These occasions fed into broader processes of reflexivity built into the heart of the Çatalhöyük project. In short, the present study does not simply document and analyse developments at Çatalhöyük but also contributes to their shaping.

As such, the study emphasises in new ways the participant part of the deployed methodology of participant-observation. It involves the studying of not a physically distant and culturally remote society, but the anthropologists' closest kin, archaeologists, many of whom have some training as anthropologists and honed understandings of the powers, implications and limitations of an anthropological gaze as well as the capacity and opportunities to challenge the ethnographer's authority. It is furthermore not an instance of applied anthropology seeking to find solutions to problems, and yet is a case where intervention cannot be withheld. A spin-off of this project will be an assessment of the implications for the broad project of ethnography of this particular exercise in participation.

While the study is in part an ethnography of the production of post-processual archaeological knowledge at Çatalhöyük and hopefully in the long-run will yield a fine-grained analysis of archaeological practice, it is explicitly not conceived of as an ethnography of the archaeologists at Çatalhöyük. In other words, the full extent of social relations at Çatalhöyük is not the object of study nor is the research method confined to participant-observation.

Deconstructionism, historicisation, detailed contextualisation and performance analysis are other strategies utilised in diverse combinations. The materials on which this paper is based were derived from a mixture of informal interviews, analysis of various texts produced by and about the project, in addition to the participant-observation from within the project by being a working member of the project, not as an excavator but as a notebook specialist with the (non-archaeological) brief of doing this particular exercise. The study thus refuses disciplinary or methodological containment as part of its own explicit research strategy.

The present study, an exercise in meta-reflexivity, is itself one device among a host of others built into the Çatalhöyük Research Project designed to encourage reflexivity, and as has already been suggested, came also to facilitate a degree of interaction among participants. The linkage between reflexivity and interaction is not inevitable, but has been, in other areas, actively structured into the Çatalhöyük Project.

In the next section of the paper I will briefly summarise some of the devices built into the Çatalhöyük Project so as to facilitate interaction and reflexivity. Time constraints prevent us from covering all the devices employed and I will rely on the fact that previous papers in this session have already begun to introduce these features. To extend the metaphor with which I opened this presentation, I liken these pioneering devices to the mudbricks moulded in situ at Çatalhöyük some eight thousand years ago. Again because of time constraints I will not be focussing on those devices which have been entirely successful--the bricks that have held their shape. Rather, I will focus on the faultlines of the project: I will try to distinguish between methodological "bricks" which might be thought to have "slumped" once in situ, and those which have been forced out of alignment as a result of structural rupture or contradiction. I will try to account for why some courses "slumped" and others "ruptured", and finally and most tentatively, I will seek to assess the significance of the slumpings and ruptures for the methodologies being developed at Çatalhöyük. The focus of this first, very preliminary paper on faultlines was suggested by the work of the French literary theorist, Pierre Machery. The central idea that I adapt somewhat loosely from his approach to textual analysis is that rather than examining a work, or a set of practices, for their continuities, successes or failures, it is often useful to seek rather the points of rupture or contradiction and try to understand why they are present, to see what they say about the matters in hand. This seemed also a way of being able to say some things about a body of research that I must emphasise is as yet in a very early stage.

Moulding the Building Bricks of a Post-Processual Methodology

A variety of devices can be identified at Çatalhöyük which constitute the moulds for the bricks that might eventually be built into what today's session title terms a post-processual methodology for archaeology. The excavation diaries kept by the project director and the supervisers in charge of the three areas of excavation (the Mellaart and North Areas begun early in August and the Summit area where excavation began a month later) provide a daily account of the evolving logic of the excavation, its successes and errors, and its suggestiveness. The recording on film of daily occasions of excavation and interpretation is another innovation holding out enormous promise for encouraging and facilitating a reflexive approach to the activities of interpretation involved in the processes of excavation and in the generation of the data on which archaeological analysis is based. The integration of the video material into the project's on-line and publicly accessible data-base places it at the heart of the research exercise alongside the hard data regarding ceramics, faunal remains, lithics and so on.

The data base itself is founded on a commitment to providing specialists in various sub-fields ready access to each other's material and working interpretations, and thereby creating possibilities for breaking out of forms of explanation and analysis limited by the horizons of the various specialities and for thinking critically and innovatively about the conventions of the sub-disciplines.

Another device structured into the field project is the attendance by the on-site but lab-based specialists of regular tours of the three excavation areas. These are designed to keep the specialists up-to-date and familiar with developments in the three areas and to provide the excavators with rapid feedback on what the laboratory people are discovering.

Similarly, instead of offering individual papers on discrete topics at this TAG conference, project participants met on a number of occasions to identify themes that cut across their particular specialities, seeking in this approach to create contexts for intensive engagement with one another's findings.

The location of a social anthropologist in the nearby village of Küçükköy opens up for consideration the implications and effects of the Çatalhöyük project on the village and vice versa. Tours of the site, specially laid on for the local Turkish workers employed on the project, similarly provide an opportunity for consideration of the nature of this mutual impact, and begin to recognise the diversity of knowledges about Çatalhöyük. Acknowledgement of popular knowledges and appropriations of Çatalhöyük, including the concerns of Mother Goddess [cultists] who visit the site, are thus not ignored because of their lack of scientific underpinnings. A variety of local, visitor and tourist needs of the site already show signs of affecting the development of the site, and the notion of a purely scientific project untouched by the pressures of public, popular and sometimes rival needs and interpretations is eschewed.

A still greater degree of multi-vocality is invited within the project. Discrete aspects of the project operate with relative autonomy; separate teams with different research agendas are invited to excavate, and diversity of participation and inerpretation is emphasised. Mid-season in 1996 at least ten nationalities were present at the site. A storytelling session held in the middle of the season underscored the commitment to multiple interpretations of Çatalhöyük.

Conservation, public presentation of a site and the availability of data often comes years after an excavation is completed, but at Çatalhöyük these features are moved up in time to proceed in step with excavation. A local journalist spent a week on site obtaining a close up view of its progress and contributed to putting knowledge of Çatalhöyük upfront for the public at an early stage in the history of the excavation. The "Friends of Çatalhöyük" actively promote public interest in and knowledge of the site.

In short then, the project is characterised by a range of features implemented to promote open, non-authoritarian and multi-vocal interpretations, wide interaction, and a high degree of reflexivity, and designed optimally to create a setting for a recursive relationship between data and theory enabling innovative thinking while shifting ownership of knowledge of Çatalhöyük out of the hands of the archaeologists currently at work on the Project. Investigation of how these features worked in practice in the 1996 season revealed however, a series of faultlines, indicating that they were not implemented without some form of slumping, and even minor earthquakes. Some of the resultant faultlines are the focus of this paper; others await long-term assessment.

It is a premise of the approach adopted for this research that these features of the project, and the Project as a whole, are fundamentally shaped by the multiple contexts of Çatalhöyük. But, just as object and context on site shift in relation to each other and to the interpretive framework applied to them, so too in the post-processual methodology of Çatalhöyük are the faultlines and their contexts mutually constitutive.

The Multiple Contexts of Çatalhöyük

The primary context of the current Çatalhöyük excavation is that constituted by the previous excavation of the site by James Mellaart in the early 1960s. Mellaart's reports and his book emphasised the preservation at Çatalhöyük of what has come to be regarded as the first example of "advanced civilisation"(mellaart 196?p11), a centre of artistic achievement and elaborate ritual. From the point of view of the public, Çatalhöyük became something of a household name in the 1960s while amongst archaeologists it achieved renown not only for its art and rich symbolism, but also for its significance for the understanding of early villages, processes of urbanisation and the development of "complex societies".

Mellaart's excavation was terminated in 1965, following a series of controversies which surrounded this excavation and other of his projects. These included the so-called Dorak Affair in which Mellaart fell under suspicion of having appropriated jewellery finds from Dorak; a scandal over the illegal sale of antiquities by workmen at his Haçilar excavation, and finally a further uproar concerning illegal antiquities sales from Çatalhöyük. The current reopening of the site has demanded that due attendance be given to this legacy and to guarantees regarding the conservation of the finds.

Indeed, the location of the site in Turkey where strict regulations pertain regarding excavation permission, monitoring of excavation, storage and the removal of finds constitutes yet another of Çatalhöyük's contexts. The

Mellaart legacy is by no means confined to the perception of problems around his handling of significant finds. Perhaps more important for the current excavation is the way in which Çatalhöyük became fixed in the popular imagination and thereby set up all sorts of preconceptions, expectations and potential assumptions around the present excavation. As one participant in the project commented, "Çatalhöyük is almost of mythical significance." As such there are substantial demands of Çatalhöyük emanating from the Mother Goddess cultists, tourists, museologists and others.

At the same time, the archaeological significance of Çatalhöyük exerts its own pressure. As a high prestige site regarded as especially significant in the emergence of "civilisation", its reopening made it the object of widespread academic attention. The Director commented on how its status made it possible to attract the best people in various fields to work in the Project. All participants remarked on what an extraordinary thing it is to work on such a site. One consequence of its status is that everyone concerned with the project brings to it both high expectations and deep commitment. They show themselves to be especially motivated to do the best possible job, with the greatest care, the best methods and the latest technology. A huge range of specialists and highly experienced field excavators congregated at Çatalhöyük -- numbers in excess of what any of the participating archaeologists are accustomed to -- eager to participate in this exercise. As one participant commented, "At Çatalhöyük there are more specialists per square metre dug than anywhere else." As much as many were eager to work at Çatalhöyük so too were other Near East archaeologists perturbed by the prospect of the prestigious Çatalhöyük site being excavated by archaeologists with no experience in Anatolian, and limited involvement in Near Eastern, archaeology.

The contested development of the school of post-processual archaeology constitutes yet another context of the present project. An often repeated remark made of the post-processual archaeologists is that the theory may not be good to dig with; effectively, the Çatalhöyük excavation is made to test the proposition that post-processual theory can generate better archaeology. This test-case status exerts particular pressures on the excavation that demand consideration.

The final, but perhaps the most important, context is that of funding. The Turkish government was motivated to reopen the site at Çatalhöyük primarily because of extent of this particular project's intention to invest in the excavation process the latest methods and the best specialists over a projected 25 year period, but, more importantly from the point of view of the Turkish authorities, the Project's commitment to develop the site and to present the site to the public early on during the excavation, and to do so in a sophisticated, well-capitalised way.

These commitments, which gave access to the site, in part dictated the scale and shape of the project, and the amounts of funding needed. The demand from the Turkish government for high calibre research matched with the concern of the participating archaeologists to treat this particular site with the maximum care. Other than bodies like the British Academy, funders are not typically committed to the scientific excellence of the process of an excavation, but rather to the value for themselves of the results of the excavation. What constitutes in their eyes "results" at Çatalhöyük is in part a product of expectations created by the sensationalism of what Mellaart found, and the need for products which resonate with the understanding and demands of the public at large of archaeology. In short, the funders are looking for spectacular material finds in the realm of art and architecture, finds which can be preserved, unveiled for journalists and generally shown off.

The next section of the paper identifies some of the faultlines of the project. Again, time constraints force me to be selective and illustrative rather than comprehensive. Since Shahina Farid focussed on three instances of faultlines in the original discussion that inspired this paper, I will follow her and confine my discussion to three examples, though there are a host of others that may come up in discussion. The first two examples have been chosen because you have already heard papers on these features of the methodology in this session.

The Faultlines

The database, much-vaunted as a device for interaction, manifested its own faultlines. Participants considered themselves to be under too much pressure to consult through the data base each other's material, the excavation diaries, or even the basic excavation documentation--the Unit Sheets. This, together with technological hitches, led to the marginalisation of the database in the 1996 season. Furthermore, discussions around the database, in part but not exclusively facilitated by my research enquiries, drew attention to the way in which the structure of the database continued to constrain participants within set categories and actively inhibited the interrogation of categories which a post-processual and contextual approach hoped to facilitate. Here, if we had the time, it would be interesting to talk about the way in which the database may insist on constituting objects and delimiting them from contexts in a manner at odds with the project's emphasis elsewhere on the need for provisionality on this question.

But as much as the data-base which was designed to facilitate openness imposed its own new constraints, it must be noted that this tension did not pass unnoticed, but became an object of attention. No-one was complacent about the data-base. This building brick may have slumped and lost something of its intended form but it was nonetheless a solid aspect of the merging methodlogy. What I mean here is that for all that the database is not yet facilitating interaction, and may in some respects be reinforcing categories, it was also the focus of anxiety over precisely these features.

Let us take another example: the video- footage designed to promote reflexivity about on-site interpretation in data gathering.

Entering of filmed clips on the database proved time-consuming and soon lagged behind daily filming. A need for substantial editing emerged, both at the level of the performance actually committed to film and also subsequently in the photographic lab in discarding footage prior to entering it into the database. Editing demanded daily decisions as to what was "important" and what was not. This appeared to compromise the potential of the filmed material to capture aspects of the interpretive process on site which the participants were not conscious of or may have deemed "unimportant". In other words, the directing and editing imposes and conceals precisely the kind of interpretive closure that the videoing seeks to reveal.

We can take this point one step further and argue that the videoing and finished works producted by the film crew for public presentation which already present the site to the public through selective use of daily footage and virtual reality reconstruction limit to their particular images the visual interpretation and imagining of the site.

But again these constraints, working to exactly the opposite effect of the project's aims, began, in the course of the 1996 season to be revealed, partly through my investigations, and through a host of other developments. As with the data-base, the way in which the videoing constrained interpretation as much as it opened it up began to be actively discussed. Likewise, sensitivity began to develop to the range of visual conventions operationalised at Çatalhöyük--in plans, crossections, photographs, footage and so on--and to how these conventions themselves constrain both interpretation and the public presentation of the site.

In contrast to my first two examples, my third and final example today does not take up a feature designed to facilitate a post-processual methodology, but a feature introduced to speed-up the excavation, the division of the team broadly into two categories, so-called "diggers" and "specialists".

One of the most substantial faultlines to manifest itself was initially conceptualised by the project participants as a "tension between diggers and specialists". In order to facilitate the sophisticated processing of excavated material on site, professional excavators experienced at speedy contract archaeology were employed to dig, and a range of specialists taken on to handle the finds in on-site laboratories. Where ideally a post-processual methodology might seek to ensure maximum interaction between the various participants, this structural arrangement potentially enforced segregation. A further range of devices were implemented to counteract any such tendencies, including regular tours of the excavation by the lab-based personnel and the introduction of elaborate sampling proceedures designed to provide the lab-based specialists with a wealth of contextual information.

Some three weeks into the season the specialist tours of the excavations, were criticised by "diggers" for being time-consuming."Specialist" demands of the "diggers" on-site were deemed by the latter to be intolerable. In particular, the "diggers" claimed that number of samples which they were required to take were so large that it affected adversely the capacity of the excavators to do their job, that of digging. Every time the excavators recognised a new unit, they were obliged to plan it, take spot heights, fill out a unit sheet, take a bulk (flotation) sample from the centre of the unit, an archive sample, and on occasion an average sample, a residue sample, pot sample, a photograph and a host of other possibilities depending on the particular character of the unit. In addition, certain of the excavators expressed frustration about being stalled in their excavation of a space while they waited on specialists to complete particular operations, such as the taking of sections or sampling of bricks. The intensity of the sampling proceedures implemented at Çatalhöyük had the spin-off effect of making excavation with a section or in meter squares especially onerous and time-consuming. What emerged then was that the demand for scientific excellence and for the detailed information needed for contextual archaeology seemed to be putting a strain on the desired goal of interaction. The camera crews, frequent public, funder and promoter tours of the site and the demands of this research exacerbated the excavators' sense of "wasting valuable time".

The anxieties of the "diggers" were summarised in the often heard claim of "being slowed up". This claim was initially most vocal from excavators working in the Mellaart area. A number of factors contributed to its manifestation early on in this setting. The first is that the major part of the season was spent removing Mellaart's in-fill and digging spaces already excavated in the 1960s. For the most part this meant working through large amounts of material that came to fill in buildings and spaces after their periods of human occupation. This contrasted sharply with developments in the North area, which was, from the start, a pristine excavation, and which quickly reached floors, platforms, burials and other interesting features. Where extreme meticulousness seemed warranted in the North area, speed was prioritised in the Mellaart area. The detailed sampling proceedure was thus perceived as more onerous and possibly even less rewarding in the Mellaart area.

The culture and habitus of the individual excavators fed into this division. Where in the North area, only one of a team of on average seven excavators, worked regularly as a contract archaeologist and the area supervisor was a research archaeologist, the Mellaart area was supervised by a professional contract archaeologist and at least four of the team of on average eight excavators worked regularly as contract archaeologists. Contract archaeologists are accustomed to working competitively with tight deadlines and under strict financial constraints. This, it would seem, developed in them a confidence and professional ease about rapid dismantling. An associated tendency appears to be a reliance on thinking through the trowel and with the materials as they are encountered in the field. It could be observed in the Mellaart area that excavators often invited each other to comment on current developments in the excavation, asking a colleague to come and "have a look", and then moving over to accommodate the person troweling in the area in question. The "contract archaeologists" were expert in reading the emerging plan [stratigraphy] and at feeling their way around the units being excavated. Characteristically their processes of interpretation were immediate, commonsensical and typically concerned with interpreting relatively gross features and changes. They were bound into trying to explain what they found, i.e. what remained, rather than what happened in the past. For the most part, the contract archaeologists favoured excavation in plan over section or in squares, though a minor exception to this needs to be noted. Those "contract archaeologists" who also carried other portfolios within the project (such as a responsibility for pot sherd processing), did not manifest the same degree of concern with excavating in plan rather than with a section. This suggests that the resistance to sections and to excavating in squares was in part an effect of the intensity of sampling which increased dramatically with excavation in squares or with a section, but was also a consequence of how the confidence of the excavators was established and maintained when pressures for speed were exerted. What emerges is that excavators who rely for their interpretation of a site solely on the emerging logic of the stratigraphy suffer a loss of confidence when a section or squares intervene in their maximal reading of the space in plan. This is expressed most strongly in their stated fear of being "misled by the section" in the one case, or being unable to link up the squares in the other. As Farid put it in her excavation diary entry of 9 September, 1996, "...a section can inform on the events in one particular location through time but 5-10 cms further in, the storey [sic, but a great slip for the stratigraphically-concerned] will change, and also sections rarely solve problems over a wide expanse of area."

The opposite position was held for the most part by research archaeologists, and was most manifest in the North area. In contrast to the contract archaeologists' interpretation through troweling and feel, the research archaeologists emphasised "seeing" and "cleaning". Characteristically their processes of interpretation were deferred, "scientific", relatively detailed, even micro, in scale, and concerned on occasion to explain what did not endure as remains, or what might be absent.

As with the database and the video footage, these faultlines generated their own highly productive spin-offs. Professional excavators and specialists alike were constantly forced to reconsider their own practices and investigate their assumptions. In all three instances, a condition of destabilisation prevailed that might be considered the heart of a methodology concerned to promote reflexivity and interaction. While to a certain extent all three examples evidence the effects of funding and speed imperatives, those effects are the most threatening and potentially deleterious to the productive tension between the professional excavators and the specialists.

Çatalhöyük is under considerable pressure from the Turkish authorities and the funders to show results quickly and make spectacular finds, to make the findings accessible, and to present the site to the public. The database and the videoing service these demands as much as they do the new methodology. The division of the team into professioanl excavators and lab-based specialists was a huge concession to the need for speed and finds, but had the effect of causing a situation of profound interrogation of archaeological practice by both the professional excavators and the specialists. However, one month into the season, the effects of the project's mode of operation--the emphasis on detail and meticulous sampling and taking of thin sections--on the rate of excavation was evident. The project director reflected the pressure exerted as a result of this realisation in his entry in the excavation diary of September:

I sometimes wonder whether modern archaeology is possible-there is such an enormous disjunction between the scientific requirements and expectations and the public (or private) purse...The people with big money want so much more than microdetail -eg reconstructed rooms, museums and car parks. To do that we need to move earth. But we aren't.

Within a week excavation in metre squares which had been implemented in the North area since the beginning of the season [check] was abandoned in favour excavation in plan. Excavators in the Mellaart area were given the go ahead to judge for themselves when sampling according to the system would impede them, while on-site decisions were taken as to how much variation of deposit could still be accommodated within one unit number. The ideal system was foregone in favour of what was "realistic."

At much the same time other forms of detailed recording implemented either the previous season or at the beginning of the 1996 season were abandoned. Detailed documentation of lithics became grosser [Jim working in bags]; at one point flotation dropped from 40 litres to 20 litres; while the specialists concerned with faunal remains also contemplated ways of speeding up their proceedures.

Where the tension between the two approaches was important early in the season in guaranteeing the co-existence of both logics, that of the site as mobilised by the professional excavators and that of the removed items presented by the specialists, towards the end of the season funding and time constraints began to compromise the specialists' situation and to tip the balance in favour of the professional excavators.

Financial pressures and the need for speed which follows therefrom is probably common to most excavations. At Çatalhöyük, the special significance of the site and its particular contexts exacerbated this situation considerably.

It remains to be seen how this deeper-lying structural contradiction will play itself out. From one point of view yielding to the pressures of funding and immediate presentation of finds appears to run the risk of sacrificing the scholarly imperatives of the excavation and the need for painstaking academic research. From another point of view these pressures force the asking of hard questions about the social role of academic enquiry. They ask anew what the purpose of excavation is, what the public responsibility of archaeologists is, and why public money should be committed to an enterprise like the Çatalhöyük excavation. What may in fact be signalled here is a need for review of what the status of university-based archaeology is in relation to society at large, a question which goes to the heart of the issue of the social and political situation of archaeological practice.

Some of the faultlines which I have identified and the attendant if productive condition of destabilisation must be recognised as also being points of structural weakness, that may threaten aspects of the enterprise. My suggestion here is that the methodology being pioneered at Çatalhöyük may need to move beyond attempts to promote interaction and reflexivity to think creatively about how to cope structurally with these weaknesses.

My point here might perhaps be best illustrated with reference to the commitment to making data immediately publicly available. While data-accessibility is highly desirable for all sorts of reasons, that accessibility runs the risk of affecting adversely the participation of young scholars on the project. The use of the database and the project commitment to making data widely and immediately available on the internet mitigate against the perennial problem within the discipline of archaeology of researchers sitting on material from unpublished sites for years. The engagement of a variety of different teams in the site, albeit in different areas, further disperses control of interpretation out of the hands of a single powerful director and into the hands of a number of senior archaeologists.

In so doing an informal convention is disrupted. Graduate student labour has long been an important resource in academic excavations which are typically cash-strapped. The "deal" usually takes the following format: graduate students process vast amounts of excavation data for the team leaders who then pull together overall interpretations. In return the graduate student stakes out a specific area for close attention and earns--by dint of many hours of lab work and seasons of excavation labour--privileged access to the relevant data which then become the basis for a Ph.d thesis. There is an implicit acknowledgment in this arrangement of a graduate student's need to take time to learn with a body of research material. By making data immediately available the Çatalhöyük project removes this period of protected access from the apprentice archaeologists and indeed runs the risk of allowing their labour to be exploited without due recompense. Even recently qualified younger archaeologists, juggling heavy junior teaching loads and the pressures of tenure track demands, who do not have research money to allow them time off to write up findings rapidly, are disadvantaged by the system. In short, the commitment to data-accessibility may weight participation in the project in favour of professionals employed to dig thereby unintentionally concentrating interpretation in the hands of a few senior archaeologists. The guild basis of archaeology is thereby challenged, which may or may not be a good thing. Either way, it is likely to cause considerable upheaval and the material conditions of participants' existence would benefit from structural attention before they erupt into social crisis.

This last point indicates that structural contradictions are not confined to the different circumstances of contract and academic archaeologists, but occur in a host of other locations, such as in differences of status among academic archaeologists.

Finally it is worth noting that the presentation of this paper by me here today is no mere report on my findings. By presenting these kinds of points in this formal setting, my paper interacts with the project participants demanding of them further ongoing reflexivity on these matters.

Conclusion

What then do we make of the faultlines which have been identified in this paper? From the point of view of structural strength, faultlines are points of weakness. If the aim at Çatalhöyük is to produce a research structure with a strength set in stone, able to withstand all pressures and pulls, then the emerging project is flawed. From a position which is concerned with process and change, faultlines signal points of rupture and shift. If the production of knowledge is viewed as a process, and if the aim of the project is to be responsive to change, the faultlines are a guarantee of flexibility, contingency, provisionality and multiplicity. But structural resilience albeit in a more tensile form remains important and demands attention. It is probably essential in ensuring that a condition of destabilisation remains productive and does not tip over into despair or demotivation. .