Çatalhöyük 1996 Archive Report

ÇATALHÖYÜK 1996 ARCHIVE REPORT

Konya Plain / Çatalhöyük regional survey

Douglas Baird

The purposes of the survey remain to reconstruct the long term settlement history of the Konya Plain and to put the site of Çatalhöyük in its historical and contemporary context. Some of the specific issues were outlined in the last issue of Anatolian Archaeology. The advantages of the Konya plain for a reconstruction of settlement history are 1) good preservation of the settlement record and 2) high visibility of much of that record. In addition, central place theory can be used to analyse settlement patterns in such settings.

The application of innovative methods has allowed us to retrieve less visible components of the record, vital for the proposed reconstruction of settlement history.

Site location:

Remote sensing using satellite imagery: - using images calibrated by our 1995 season investigations, this method yielded previously unrecognised sites of several periods. Stephen Holmes, Edinburgh University, has processed the images and identified the key features. 50% of the potentially significant features that were inspected proved to be new sites.
Canal walking continued to yield sites not on the topographic maps.
Field walking recovered sites not on maps and artifact scatters probably relating to ancient agriculture, specifically in the Classical period.
General inspection of the topography revealed new sites. These methods have added significantly to the site record detailed on the topographic maps.

Site comprehension:

Contour survey and intensive collection continue to produce vital and detailed information about site histories on the many multi-period tells.

As a result of intensive and systematic retrieval methods many buried Neotithic, Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age occupations have been identified on Iron Age, Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine sites.

We have also had considerable success in isolating site components of particular periods or types and documenting the complex histories of particular sites. E.g. at Musalar, a small Early Chalcolithic mound was identified, part of larger Hellenistic to Byzantine mound complex. On the same site a separate and substantial Byzantine building occupied its own eminence. A common phenomenon, identified as a result of these techniques, is the large scale growth of some smaller Hellenistic settlements into major Roman-Byzantine sites. The expanded Roman-Byzantine settlements appear to be laid out around pools.

This work has also revealed that a number of apparently small tells have extensive settlement areas surrounding them on the surface of the plain.

Preliminary results indicate the following new perspectives:

Several smaller Neotithic sites exist in this part of the plain around Çatalhöyük. Where precise size information is available they are much smaller than Çatalhöyük. Clear differentiation in the nature of communities is indicated. This allows some re-evaluation of the possibility that Çatalhöyükis a centre serving subsidiary communities in some fashion.

This pattern and indeed site locations continue unaltered into the Early Chalcolithic. Çatalhöyük(west) may be a centre serving subsidiary communities in some fashion at this period as well.

The massive increase in frequency of sites and appearance of a classic rank size hierarchy of settlements indicates the development of urbanism in the area c. 3000 BC by or in the Early Bronze I-II periods. Central place models designed to analyse such systems in such settings do not easily fit, and therefore do not readily explain the emerging urban pattern.

Settlements virtually disappear from this area in the late third and second Millennium BC, This is not a function of the recognition of appropriate artifact assemblages or indeed some sites. In the 96 season we identified a few such sites, classic small tells, presumably nucleated settlements. Whatever the explanation (a number are possible) a radical transformation of settlement followed the mid-third millennium BC and this situation persisted throughout the second millennium.

Settlements reappear in numbers in the late Iron Age. Several exactly contemporary sites can be documented as we refine our definition of ceramic assemblages of this period. This is possible because of the number of single period sites in this time range in the area. These represent small settlements clustered in only part of the survey area. Such clustering could reflect environmental conditions such as the presence of the most important branch of the Çarsamba river in this area at this period.

The Hellenistic period, contrary to some views, is characterised by a dense distribution of what are presumably small sedentary agricultural villages, or in some cases possibly estates, packed on the fan, one per six km2. Within the survey area there are no urban centres.

There is clear continuity from the Hellenistic into the Roman-Byzantine period in site location and presumably land management and the partitioning of the landscape. The new feature of this period is the development of a few smaller Hellenistic sites, during the Roman-Byzantine period, into evenly spaced larger settlements, c. 12-18 ha., small towns whose distribution and that of their smaller neighbours accords with one of the classic central place models. Intriguingly these large settlements grow up around low lying areas, which are the setting for pools in the modern landscape. Broadly contemporary settlements in North Jazira of Iraq show a similar phenomenon (Wilkinson and Tucker 1995, 32-35). Here there seems to be evidence of a common water harvesting system for settlements in contemporary Anatolia and North Mesopotamia.

A number of Medieval-Early Modern settlements have been identified some of which probably belong to the period when early Ottoman records and references of some travelers document relatively intensive settlement on the plain.

References:

Wilkinson, T. and Tucker, D. 1995 Settlement Development in the North Jazira, Iraq.