More than an pretty face: the place of decoration at Çatalhöyük

Today I want to develop some ideas about context, contrast and relationship - by looking at questions like:

the appropriate locations for art or decoration the relationship between architecture and fixtures on the one hand and portable objects on the other the dynamic of change over time within buildings the implications of all these for understanding human practice within the household.

albeit with the recognition that in a contextual analysis all these other issues are interrelated. Two questions we can ask: could the site have reached such a size, or regularly acquired enough obsidian, without the presence of these images?

Mellaart noticed that different motifs tended to occur on different sides of the building, for instance bulls were more frequent on north walls, facing the Taurus mountains. If we accept that the images are more than just decorative, then the famous volcano painting, for instance, also implies an awareness of the cosmological significance of the landscape and the settlement. Indeed by making the landscape active and changeable it stresses the relationship between the natural and cultural worlds. And in another sense the presence of obsidian brings the volcano into the house.

Other interpretations are possible, of course, but symbolic analogies of this sort should not surprise us. There are numerous ethnographic examples of the cosmological significance of house orientation and layout from the Amazon to East Africa to South-east Asia. Too often, however, such ethnography is presented as a formalised model of the ideal house, denying the variability that inevitably occurs in practice. The number of rooms excavated by Mellaart provides a striking sense of the structure/agency dialectic. Building 1 in the new area, for instance, resembles very closely in its layout shrine VI.?? in Mellaart's area, but the way our building was altered and accreted to through time is very different. So does the cosmic structure of the house also define appropriate positions for particular actions, and what role do the wall images play in creating or maintaining those meanings?

The house, by its subterranean aspect, also represents a microcosm - independent of its relationship with the wider landscape. The lack of apertures to other buildings and of party walls defines the house as an independent unit. Within this microcosm it is the internal logic of the relationship of images to other fixtures that counts. For instance, Mellaart's work suggests that the images are not generally found at the ladder/oven end of the house, which is usually the south.

Why should this be?

Is it because the lighting of fires here would have damaged or obscured the art? This seems unlikely given that wall paintings were anyway frequently covered or repainted - their longevity or preservation was not necessary a consideration.

Or is it because the images emphasise differential meanings or valuations of spaces? Better - but there are various attributes with which we might correlate architectural decoration, besides ovens or ladders.

e.g. burials - to some extent painting appears to be concentrated where burials are found. Certainly the more elaborate decoration within B.1, such as it is, corresponds to some extent with the presence of burials: the NW platform, which had the most burials, was periodically painted red and was also close to the fixture subsequently removed from the western wall of this space. However the fit is not an exact one - there are also symbolic elements (wall fixtures) in the SW and in space 70, but not in the north and east where burials were also found.

Another possibility concerns the valuation of spaces in terms of dirt, cleanliness and discard. Inside:outside distinctions are particularly clear at CH, with most of Mellaart's pottery, for instance, coming from the so-called 'courtyard' areas outside houses. And around our B.1 there is more animal bone from extra-mural spaces than within houses. At a finer scale, within B.1 there were far more artefacts and bones from space 70 and the southern and north-eastern parts of space 71 than from elsewhere in the building.

Were some areas kept cleaner than others because they were special, or at least different? In fact the artefact distributions (rubbish) correspond much more closely with the absence of burials than of images. A number of potsherds, in particular, came from the south-west of space 71 and the north of space 70 where animal parts were deliberately set into walls (the distribution map understates the number of sherds in this half of space 70). Neither sherds nor decoration came from space 111.

But we're missing the vertical dimension. For one thing we do not know what was happening on the upper parts of the wall. The possible collapsed arch or niche may have framed something in the southern part of B1. Moreover many of the artefacts came from fill contexts, perhaps in some cases fallen in with roof collapse, and so can be only vaguely related at best to the performance of any activities other than discard. My general impression is that floors were kept remarkably clean.

So it may be more fruitful to ask how maintenance or abandonment procedures which kept house-floors clean relate to the removal or 'decommissioning' of some 'decorative' features in B.1, specifically the pit dug to recover the western wall sculpture. While cleanliness seems to have been next to godliness (or perhaps goddessliness) some things could be left in abandoned buildings (portable artefacts like grindstones and pots, burnt foodstuffs - we had deposits of acorns and lentils) but others (some wall images) could not and had to be recovered.

Again we shouldn't overstate this on the basis of one house. After all, many of Mellaart's rooms memorably had rather intact features. But perhaps we are seeing something here of the power of these features. In this case the life of the image seems to have been bound up with the life of the house, more than with the lives of the people - it didn't seem to matter, for example, that the pit dug for the wall sculpture disturbed some of the burials under the painted platform.

So perhaps the images are part of the fabric of the house, and a building without particular 'decorations' could no more serve the function of a house than a building without a roof. We cannot detach the images from their walls and decontextualise them without doing them as much violence as the diggers of pit 17. Trying to correlate images with other features therefore misses the point - like trying to make a symbolic argument out of the fact that the roof is always placed above the floor.

If we turn to Mellaart's work we lose the opportunity to look at artefact patterning within rooms but we do gain a quantitative aspect. One of the main conclusions of a recent reanalysis of Mellart's area is that there is no duality between rooms and shrines, but rather a continuum of complexity, however measured. There are different ways of interpreting this complexity gradient:

one is that we are looking at rooms abandoned at different stages of a cycle between plain and elaborate. Another is that elements of complexity like wall images could only be acquired when the household achieved a certain status, however we define that (I don't mean social rank). Rissa gives the example of Indian 'Feasts of Merit' which earn the household the right to display mithan (cattle) heads to embellish their domestic shrines.

Both models convey the temporal dynamic rather well, but the second implies something about social relations between households or larger groups. If the acquisition of images depended on communal acts then the presence of the CH images would contribute to the cohesion of the community and to the very survival of so large of a settlement. That's an answer to my first question. As a corollary to this is the occasional deposition of unusual items, such as complete or articulated bones, in the midden areas, which were presumably used by a number of buildings. Perhaps the production of images within the house may be related to specialised consumption without.

If we can approach the images in terms of discursive spatial meanings or ritual practices, how can we integrate this ceremonial view of the household with one based on the non-discursive routines of mundane, domestic life, the practices and daily strategies which were pursued around the rituals. In this context we have to move from a consideration of the appropriate position of images to that of the appropriate medium for images.

I want to briefly consider the obsidian and the ceramics from CH in this context. But somewhere between the wall images and the pots are the figurines: portable, made of clay but also iconographic. They obviously signify, like the paintings, but the animals charm us rather than frighten us, and they tend to get thrown out with the rubbish. Some nice ones came from midden deposits in the Mellaart area, for instance. In Mellaart's buildings figurines, unlike wall images, do frequently seem to have been associated with storage areas and hearths. Similarly in B.1, figurines and selected stones were found in the area of the FI in the south of space 70. But these objects are not without ritual power - finds associated with sub-floor contexts and grain bins suggest they were regarded as effective foundation or fertility deposits. The figurines may be one means of linking the discursive rituals of the wall images and the routinised practices of other elements of portable material culture.

Another would be to consider artefacts from the viewpoint of production rather than consumption. Jim suggests that the more complex rooms mentioned above were associated with specialised obsidian production. The links of meaning we can develop here may include the specific skills of knapping - there is certainly an aesthetic in the long blades produced but it is an aesthetic of form quite distinct from the rather cluttered wall images. Nevertheless it heightens the sense of mystery of obsidian production which has symbolic links through blood (these blades were used for cutting, shaving, etc. but knapping would also draw blood) back to the red ochre of the burials and wall paintings. Could obsidian manufacture even have been a shamanistic practice? Perhaps the means by which obsidian reached the site was not the early credit card - which rather pleased our sponsors - but an exchange based on the magical control of nature which the CH people, through their images of taming and domesticating, may have bartered with. So now I've answered my second question!

Ceramic sequences make explicit the choices exercised in the media for particular discourses, since pottery is an appropriate medium for painted decoration and was certainly so used in later periods. But at CH East the ceramics are almost never decorated in this way, and clearly whatever meanings the pots may have conveyed were quite different from those of the wall images.

But this is not to imply the pottery is meaningless: just that the primary means of ceramic elaboration is not painting but burnishing (SLIDE). Now this can be a functional treatment but the high burnish on many pots and the directionality evident in a lot of cases suggests it also had a decorative purpose - not a decoration concerned with concrete images, however, but with the quality of light. And the same might be said of the highly reflective obsidian cores, for instance, which were sometimes used to make mirrors.

The VR reconstructions obviously consider the conditions in which the wall images were meant to be seen but perhaps we should think more about contexts in which pots were meant to be seen: the sheen of their burnish suggests an interest in reflected light, whether sunlight, if the pots were positioned outside, or firelight if they were kept inside, around the hearths.

Maybe we should see these everyday objects as reflective of the play of light and colour taking place in the decorated, firelit houses. In the same way the daily routines in which they were employed are the unacknowledged reflections of the strategies households played more openly in whatever rituals or meanings were attached to the wall images. Danny Miller's book Artefacts as Categories stressed the use of pots as frames for ritual action in his Indian case study. They lack discursive meanings on their own but the performances in which they participate, however passively, would be incomplete without them.

Mellaart suggests most intra-mural ceramic remains came from the vicinity of hearths and ovens, although there is little published evidence to back this up; he also found occasional in situ vessels within rooms (you can see these reconstructed in Ankara or, if you ask nicely, the storeroom of Konya museum - unfortunately exact provenances have been lost somewhere along the way) and we have one nearly intact pot from within B.1 - although I wonder if its distribution in 3 large pieces across a distance of over 1m and its lack of completeness means it actually fell in from the roof. It's not a highly burnished vessel and therefore poses the question whether pots with different degrees of investment were used for different purposes or in different areas. Perhaps this one was an outdoors pot. We need more in situ finds to answer this, but if the distribution of potsherds in basal fill and floor units is anything to go by then the finer vessels were in the more peripheral areas of spaces 70 and 110. There are different discourses here, though we can't read them yet. However somewhere in the domestic space which contains the images and the objects they come together and are mediated.

It is interesting that the contrast between the wall images and the pots is turned around in the ensuing Early Chalcolithic. Investigations on Early Chalcolithic sites like CHW and Can Hasan have found that pottery was far more common and also more elaborate, while wall paintings disappear. This may reflect a decline in the significance of the individual house as opposed to more communal structures - burial for one thing no longer occurs within houses. It is notable also that the number of EChal sites in the Konya Plain is greater. In a situation where relationships between sites of similar status are important then portable decorated items like pottery achieve a significance in terms of exchange and group identity (this aspect of material culture style has been well covered in the literature).

The Neolithic landscape on the other hand was dominated by CH which in its size and internal complexity was a new development for Anatolian communities. In this case the relationships between households within the settlement were more significant and the strong sense of shared meanings and rituals which the wall images project, not least within the household unit, may have been an essential aspect in making this early Neolithic venture in community life possible.

Hence there are different ways to pursue the question of decoration or the lack of it on obsidian artefacts or pottery - the spatial argument (i.e. where is the pottery in relation to the wall images), the experiential (i.e. under what lighting conditions were pots used and seen), and the social (i.e. what was the role of decoration in the network of personal relations within household and community).