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Unusual finds fuel new ideas about the impetus for one of the first long-term settlements (above, the site today). (Catalhoyuk Research Project)
The Seeds of Civilization
Why did humans first turn from nomadic wandering to villages and togetherness? The answer may lie in a 9,500-year-old settlement in central Turkey
By Michael Balter
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE | SUBSCRIBE
MAY 2005
578
Basak, they need you in Building 42 again.”
Basak Boz looked up from the disarticulated human skeleton spread out on the laboratory bench in front of her.
The archaeologist standing in the lab doorway shuffled his dusty boots apologetically. “It looks like something really important this time,” he said.
Building 42 is one of more than a dozen mud-brick dwellings under excavation at Catalhoyuk, a 9,500-year-old Neolithic, or New Stone Age, settlement that forms a great mound overlooking fields of wheat and melon in the Konya Plain of south-central Turkey. In the previous two months, archaeologists working on Building 42 had uncovered the remains of several individuals under its white plaster floors, including an adult, a child and two infants. But this find was different. It was the body of a woman who had been laid on her side, her legs drawn to her chest in a fetal position. Her arms, crossed over her chest, seemed to be cradling a large object.
Boz, a physical anthropologist at HacettepeUniversity in Ankara, Turkey, walked up a hill to Building 42. She took out a set of implements, including an oven baster for blowing off dust and a small scalpel, and set to work. After about an hour, she noticed a powdery white substance around the object the skeleton cradled.
“Ian!” she said, beaming. “It’s a plastered skull!” Ian Hodder, the StanfordUniversity archaeologist who directs the Catalhoyuk excavations, was making his morning rounds of the 32-acre site. He crouched next to Boz to take a closer look. The skull’s face was covered with soft, white plaster, much of it painted ochre, a red pigment. The skull had been given a plaster nose, and its eye sockets had been filled with plaster. Boz could not be sure if the skull was male or female at first, but from the close knitting of the suture in the cranium (which closes as people age), she could tell that it belonged to an older person; later testing showed it was a woman’s.