Reconstructing the midden pits

The big pits in the midden that Lisa and co. have been digging are really odd things. I've never seen features quite like them. They resemble the sort of pits dug to extract wall-installations and paintings, but on a huge scale. And they're dug, so it seems, to get at the mudbrick - the wall itself rather than anything on it. Why? Surely they have enough mud around to manufacture new mudbrick, and why quarry old mudbrick for fill if you're knocking down a building anyway and therefore have enough to do the infilling job out of what you've demolished. Unless there was something particularly special about the building that they were going down to, of course - won't know that until it's dug, and it won't be, so there's another mystery left tantalisingly hanging in mid-air.

I told Lisa a week ago that I would do a reconstruction of it, and I now have. I built a model of the pits based on the plan and then picked a point of view that showed them off best. Lisa seems happy with the image - the only alteration she suggested was a minor one: making sure you can see the walls being dug down to in the sections of the pits. That makes sense. I'll change the drawing this evening to make sure you can see that detail.

Settling in

It's my first proper working day on site this season and I'm slowly working my way through Sarah's documentation of the database work and general IT issues she's encountered while she was here. At this stage, I only have one major 'new' application to work on, and in large part that's thanks to Sarah's hard work over the past months, both on- and off-site.

I'm hoping that now that the hard grunt work of centralising, bug fixing, cleaning and consolidating the existing databases over the past few years is (mostly) over, and the applications I created in previous years are bedded in, I'll have a real chance to think about what else we can do with all this data. I was so busy before I left London that I hadn't really had a chance to get excited about coming back to Catalhoyuk but as soon as I was on my way I realised that this could be an immensely intellectually rich and rewarding two weeks.

There's always so much new technology, I'm sure there's a knack to not getting carried away by every new possibility. But I can't help but wonder what would happen if we recreated Catalhoyuk in Second Life or another 3D world. Imagine re-populating the mound with a living community of real people!

I'd love to see how we could use semantic web/Web 2.0 technologies to open up our data to the rest of the world. I'm interested in the tagging technologies emerging through folksonomies like steve.museum, and wonder if we could apply them to the finds data we publish on the web.

I've realised that you could almost think of the excavation diary entries as blog posts, in which case Catalhoyuk has a blog that goes back to 1997.

Reconstructing Building 63

I've been working one two new building reconstructions this week: Building 63 in the Istanbul trench and the West Mound's Chalcolithic building (excavated pre-2006). The former is a completely new building - excavation started last season and continues this season - and the latter is an old building that is going to be re-opened by the new West Mound team. While my approach to both buildings has been basically similar, the actual process involved in producing the reconstructions has been quite different.

Building 63

Building 63 is the burnt building in the northern part of the Istanbul trench. They came down onto it fairly quickly and exposed the latest phase and its associated collapse during the course of last season. This was, of course, the building in which was found the half-skeletal, half-fat figurine. But the building also presented a number of interesting features, including bins, divided platforms, some pedestals and pilasters and a lot of unworked stone and various stone implements. Only the south-west corner of the building is located within the trench, and so "Building 63" is represented only by the southern end of its western room and the southern end of what may turn out to be its central room (if it follows a "standard plan"). Despite the fact that only a portion of the building has been excavated, I still thought it would be worth doing a reconstruction of it, particularly as the team was beginning to reveal portions of a distinctively earlier phase to the building.

So, the first thing I did was talk to Mihriban and Gunes about the building and had them talk me through the structure and its history as much as they understood it. There could identify an earlier and a later phase, both of which seemed to have concluded with a burning episode. The later phase floors in the western space were had large amounts of worked and unworked stone on them; the earlier phase floors were heavily damaged. There seem to have been two phases of bin construction as well, although the exact nature of that isn't entirely clear. In the eastern portion of the building, the later phase is represented by the divided platform and its kerb, a pilaster against the southern wall and two pedestals against the western internal wall. We now know that during the earlier phase the platform was covered with red paint and then raised by about fifteen centimetres with various makeup layers. There's an earlier phase of one of the pedestals when it was a box-like bin and subsequently filled to incorporate a small cattle skull; whether this feature existed at the same time as the red platform we don't yet know.

Given, then, that the earlier phase hasn't been completely revealed, I thought it best to concentrate on the later one. I started with the an overall plan done a week or so ago, and produced an axonometric (quasi-Cavelier, I suppose you might also call it) projection from it, as I do for all the buildings. This drawing is an excellent way to produce a clear, concise 3D image of the building, extending the truncated features up to their original height and appearance. There is very little speculation in this type of reconstruction; even the roof is usually only indicated in very basic form.

While these projected drawings are very useful, they have a drawback in that their point of view is utterly unnatural. Not only are you, the viewer, perched somewhere in midair looking down on the building, but the building itself is cutaway to enable one to look inside it. This god-like perspective is a convention we're all used to, of course, but it's still very artificial, and gives very little sense of what the building must have been like to move around in. I always think that giving the viewer of a reconstruction a real feeling of what being inside a building was like is almost important as showing all the correctly-phased features. After all, how can you begin to understand how a building functioned if you only ever see it through the conventional window of a plan or projected reconstruction? Surely the artificiality of the view affects the resulting understanding?

With that in mind, my next stage is always to produce something a little more naturalistic - a reconstruction illustration showing what the building would have been like if you were standing inside it.From the plan of Building 63 and using my projected drawing as a guide, I built a very simple 3D model. From this model I generated a QTVR and several renders from different points of view within the building. I was looking for a vantage point within the building that showed off as many features as possible but also gave a good sense of the building's layout. In the end I chose a view from the northeast corner of the trench - actually on the section line, I suppose - looking towards the southwest. This POV allows one to see all the main features in the eastern space, and looks across the platform towards the bins in the western space. Although you can't quite see into the northern part of the western space, as it's hidden by the internal wall, you can clearly see that the building continues that way. I could have cut the interior wall down, but I didn't want to use conventions like that, not for this illustration. For this type of drawing I like to go a little "further" in the sense of being a tad more speculative in reconstruting the details of the features. The underside of the roof is clearly shown, the bins and fire installations are shown being used, and the slot dividing the two platforms is shown to be an emplacement for a wooden screen - Gunes' idea. There's also a basket hanging from the ceiling above a place on the late floor where a collection of phytoliths, bones and burnt seeds were found. I would not call the reconstrution of these details "highly" speculative, but they do go a step further than anything found in the projected drawings. At present, the illustration is un-peopled, simply because I wanted to keep it clear so that the Istanbul team could see all the features and be able to comment on them without having to try and see around people. But it's my intention to add a couple of people to complete the impression of viewing the house as a place that was lived and worked in. Here's the illustration:

That's as far as I've gotten at the moment, but there is now a third stage. This stage is best represented by the illustrations I did for the upcoming Catalhoyuk volume on the North and South Area excavations. These are vignettes illustrating various activities that created specific events present in the archaeology. Take the cattle skull inside the box/bin feature. That's an event, and while you can reconstruct the feature when it was a bin and when it was a pedestal, you can also reconstruct the event that turned the bin into a pedestal with a skull in it. This goes, again, one step "further" than the second type of illustration I talked about above. Here you are reconstruting people, clothing, attitudes, deportment and so on which give a very particular emotional "charge" to the final image. Are there many people involved? Only a few? One? Are they happy? Sad? Indifferent? Did the event take place in one stage? Many? Quickly? Slowly? Is the event 'ceremonial' in nature, or 'workaday', taking place within the daily routine? Or is it somewhere between the two? Is it dark or well-lit within the building? Is anything else going on at the same time? All these representational choices conspire to create a final image which is highly subjective. Any two illustrators will produce very different illustrations, and even a single illustrator may well produce two very different illustrations if the circumstances surrounding the production is different: Did you sleep well last night? Who is peering over your shoulder while you draw? What kind of comments are they making? And yet, at some point, the image may be picked up and published, giving it a particular status and authority.

Sorry - this has gone on rather longer than I anticipated. I'll post this now and write up my reconstructing of the West Mound building a little later. In the meantime, I'm now going back to Finds drawing - I have a tray full of figurines and some rather nice obsidian to draw.

Finds Drawing

Spent all of yesterday doing finds illustrations - a whole collection of clay objects that Sonya left for me to draw, and several animal figurines that are part of this year's etudluk [museum study] collection. The clay objects are really unusual - small shapes with pointed tops and bottoms; one that's triangular. Very different from anything I've ever seen here before. They aren't fired or baked, so no idea what they could be used for, either.

But that's Catalhoyuk in a nutshell, isn't it? The moment you think you've seen it all, something completely new turns up. Plastered skulls, strange figurines, unbaked clay objects, lamb burials, crane bones, bear stamp seals, buildings-within-buildings, pits dug through middens - every season something turns up that's completely new even to the most experienced excavator or lab team member. It's no exaggeration to say that finds like these completely change our understanding of this site, and demonstrate how important it is to be flexible, to keep an open mind and be prepared to alter ones interpretations (dramatically so, if that is what is required) in order to take new data into account.

On a lighter note, I've finished all the artwork for the comic newsletter. The text is now being translated, and once that's finished I'll incorporate it into the artwork and make any final alterations to layout, etc.. I think it looks good - I hope the kids in Kucukkoy like it, too.

The Week Ahead

Day off yesterday, but still somehow ended up in the lab doing some work. How does that happen?

Finished off some initial reconstructions from last season that had remained unfinished. These are projected reconstructions, to scale and taken directly from the final excavation plan of the phase and building in question. These illustrations may be a little dry and static, but they're extremely useful as a first step in recreating the appearance of the building. I'll use these as the basis for other, more "artistic" reconstructions later on. I've also been working more on the comic strip, and have just about completed the drawings for all the panels. This week I'll combine them with the finished layouts for each page, and turn the English text over to one of our Turkish team-members for translation. Hopefully we'll have something almost complete by the end of the week.

My other jobs for this week include sitting down with the directors of the Istanbul University excavation and going through their excavation plans from last year in order to do a reconstruction of their small building. It has a number of unusual features in it: a set of bins, a "closed" pedastal containing a bucrania and surrounded by a deposit of raw stone, and a collection of worked grinding stones in the room next door. In addition, the building burned down at some point, providing an interesting closure to the building's history.

Plus, of course, there's the regular round of finds illustration, including drawing some really nice pieces of obsidian that came out of a cache in the North Area. I know the lithics people think I don't like drawing chipped stone - but I do! I'm just not as obsessed with it as they are! But these are nice pieces - really nice pieces. The only thing that I don't like about drawing obsidian as opposed to flint or chert is that obsidian can be so hard to see properly because it's both translucent and reflective; makes it hard to make out the detail sometimes.

Ovens, Hearths and Firins

Still working hard to get through the 2004 material – should be done tomorrow. Things are slower as I take segments of the day to work on my oven/hearth project and the community archaeology project. Burcu and I continue to visit local villages interviewing people about their ideas about archaeology and their uses of clay. We have learned a great deal about making and using ovens and hearths – and about cooking in general.

We’ve seen about 10 different ovens, hearths, and tandirs (breadoven). Everyone seems to have their own way of making it. One thing I noticed is that our friend Saliha, who lives in Kücükköy has an oven and hearth similar to her mother’s, who lives in Abdatolu. This made me wonder if the variation we see in ovens and hearths is due to the knowledge women pass from one generation to the next, learning from their mother. That may account for the variation we have seen in the local villages and it may have something to do with the production practices at Çatalhöyük.

We talked to one women (Azize) who brought the clay from her oven all the way from Antalya. Other women – most of them – get the clay and plaster material locally. We went to visit some of the locations where they get their clay and Burcu collected samples. I’ve been asking a lot questions about which foods are cooked in the hearth and which in the oven. I’m trying to understand the difference between the bread oven (tandir), the hearth (ocak) and an upright oven (firin). Some women have all of these and use a different fire installation to cook different foods or use one of them in the winter and the other(s) in the warmer months.

It’s been fantastic to learn about how the ovens are made, who makes them (mostly women, (but in one village the men make the ovens), and how they are destroyed, repaired, replastered, and rebuilt. This is incredibly helpful for our work at Çatalhöyük since it can help us to understand the ovens and hearths we find on site. This, in turn, helps us understand the cooking practices. There are no clay ball used in contemporary local villages, but there are clay ovens!
Here’s a photo of one of the oven-hearth combos we saw. This is Hacer’s oven – in Kücükköy. The tandir (bread oven) is the large circular part of the fire installation and the open air hearth (toward the front of the photo) is used for making most other food.


One of the best parts of all of this is meeting these fantastic women and hearing about their lives and the pride they take in feeding their family. The wonderful food they give us from these ovens during our visits is a special treat. It’s absolutely true what they say ….there is nothing like Turkish hospitality.

Reconstruction

Today I’ve nearly finished looking at all the clay balls from the South area that were excavated in 2004. It is amazing how few clay balls there are in the upper levels. I can’t believe that all the clay balls excavated in 2004 fit into one case! That is unbelievable. Compared to other years where there are 5-6 or more crates filled with balls and that is only from the South area. It is a clear change that we can see on the site.

Burcu helped me with the clay balls today for a brief time. She walked by my desk and saw that I was working on fitting several broken pieces of a large clay ball from one unit back together. I was getting a bit frustrated and she said she’d take over. We worked on the ball for about an hour and it is nearly completely refit now. That is all thanks to Burcu – I was far too impatient for refitting today. Some days are good for refitting, but not today. Today is a recording day. I need to feel particularly patient to work on refitting pieces.

Here’s the reconstructed clay ball – from unit 10518. It’s piece number is 10518m1. And here’s Burcu – she had the magic fingers today!

Illustrations in June

It's hard to believe I've been here a month already! But we got here on the 3rd of June, and it's now the 3rd of July. As usual, there's been a lot going on, so here's a quick summary of what I've been working on this past month.

Sonya's laying the foundations of an outreach/public archaeology project that she's hoping to start running properly next year. Part of this project - a small part - involves the creation of an informational newsletter to be distributed to the local schoolchildren. To make it more accessible for them, Sonya came up with the idea that the newsletter should be in comic form. So I am now putting together illustrations for that - a big change from drawing obsidian and reconstructions of Neolithic buildings! But it's been great fun getting the look of it right and doing comic versions of all of us here on site.

I've also been completing the series of building reconstruction illustrations from 2004 and 2005. These are standard axonometric projected reconstructions taken from the excavation plans. I've also been working on new views of these buildings as well, these ones done from the same point of view as the final photographs of each building. That way we can sit the reconstruction image right next to the photograph and people who aren't as familiar with the site as we are can still get a good idea of what's being shown and how it's being reconstructed.

And, as ever, I am doing vignette-type illustrations based on evidence of various activities and processes from the excavations. There's a good little obsidian-knapping episode, a strange deposit that might possibly be either an application of decoration or something related to cleaning, and a burial with lots of phytoliths all from Building 56 in the South Area. Meanwhile, in the North Area, there's a massive late-Byzantine structure (possibly a barn or other agricultural building) and a number of interesting Byzantine graves. And from last season I've done a new painting of the wall installation in Building 52, and am working on vignettes of the CH03 and CH04 dog burials with Kathy. In TP, they've got their various building levels related to the old 1960s plans, and so have now been able to connect their buildings to his excavations, which means I'm now able to do reconstructions of those levels in that area and show both the TP buildings and ones excavated in the 1960s.

And then, of course, there are the finds illustrations. We've had a number of relatively intersting pieces come through: fragments of moulded white plaster from the North Area's late building, the usual animal figurines and beads and so on from the middens being excavated in the North, etc. Nothing as amazing as last year... yet.

For the remainder of the week I'll be working on the building reconstructions from CH05, finishing off the comic strip and following developments as Buildings 51 and 58 continue to be excavated. Plus, there's a small box of Clay Objects to draw for Sonya, and a couple of new figurines that just came down from the North to keep me busy on the finds drawing front.