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The Goddess and the Bull : Catalhoyuk: An Archaeological Journey to the Dawn of Civilization :: 0743243609
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| Thousands of years before the pyramids were built in Egypt and the Trojan War was fought, a great civilization arose on the Anatolian plains. The Goddess and the Bull details the dramatic quest by archaeologists to unearth the buried secrets of human cultural evolution at this huge, spectacularly well-preserved 9,500-year-old village in Turkey. Here lie the origins of modern society -- the dawn of art, architecture, religion, family -- even the first tangible evidence of human self-awareness, the world's oldest mirrors. Some archaeologists have claimed that the Mother Goddess was first worshipped at Çatalhöyük, which is now a site of pilgrimage for Goddess worshippers from all over the world. The excavations here have yielded the seeds of the Neolithic Revolution, when prehistoric humans first abandoned the hunter-gatherer life they had known for millions of years, invented farming, and began living in houses and communities. Michael Balter, the excavation's official biographer, brings readers behind the scenes, providing the first inside look at the remarkable site and its history of scandal and thrilling scientific discovery. He tells the very human story of two colorful men: British archaeologist James Mellaart, who discovered Çatalhöyük in 1958 only to be banned from working at the site forever after a fabulous ancient treasure disappeared without a trace; and Ian Hodder, a pathbreaking archaeological rebel who reinvented the way archaeology is practiced and reopened the excavation after it had lain dormant for three decades. Today Hodder leads an international team of more than one hundred archaeologists who continue to probe the site's secrets. Balter reveals the true story behind modern archaeology -- the thrill of history-making scientific discovery as well as the crushing disappointments, the community and friendship, the love affairs, and the often bitter rivalries between warring camps of archaeologists. Along the way, Balter describes the cutting-edge advances in archaeological science that have allowed the team at Çatalhöyük to illuminate the central questions of human existence. Editorial Descriptions are usually submitted by the manufacturers, publishers and authors. Contact us if you are one of them, and wish to change the above description. |
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Author: Guest
I very much enjoyed Balter's book. I've been doing archaeology for 25 years and teaching methods and theory for almost 15 years. One thing that sort of grates in popular treatments of archaeological work is a focus on headline-grabbing -- big, spectacular pronouncements, with far too little attention paid to how the data were actually generated. And any attention to theory tends to to take one of two forms: Archaeology=Science or Archaeology=Indiana Jones.
Balter's book is different. For one thing, the topic is different, not Lucy or pre-Clovis or cave art or King Tut. The focus here is somewhat more subtle: not individual artefacts (although those can be pretty spectacular), but the question of how modern societies got to be that way, how we started to learn to live together in towns. Catal Höyük is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world, and it's nice to see it get its due. Second, the book focuses on the _biography_ of the site, the processes through which it was discovered and excavated and analysed through time, and that biography is always central in determining how archaeologists and the general public understand any site. We wouldn't be thinking about Catal Höyük in the way we do today without Mellart's work there, without the claims about urbanism and ritual and hierarchy that he made and even without the arguments about Mother Goddesses. Balter does an excellent job of writing the site's biography, and of telling us why, in fact, Catal Höyük is so important.
Third, Balter takes theory seriously. Lots of archaeologists hate theory, and most journalists are utterly, completely clueless on the topic. Balter has a pretty good understanding of theoretical developments in (English-speaking) archaeology since the 1960s, and he appreciates how important that theory is in the biography of Catal Höyük -- and in the biography of Ian Hodder, head of the project and the central figure in post-processualist theorising since the 1980s. (Archaeologists interested in post-processualism will probably find Balter's account of how Hodder's own theoretical leanings developed interesting in their own right: I know that I did.)
And fourth, Balter's account of the social aspect of excavation on the site is great. Archaeological projects are usually intensely social situations -- sometimes too much so -- unlike the more solitary work of cultural anthropologists. The goings-on in field camps often enter the folklore of the discipline, and again are part of the biography of the site. Digs _are_ 'Archaeology Camp' (sometimes in both senses of the latter word) and it's refreshing to see a realistic portrayal of how fieldwork happens on one of the biggest, most complex archaeological projects in the world.
This book is really excellent. I've been recommending it to acquaintances, not just as a book about Catal Höyük (although it's great coverage of that site) but as a book about how archaeology gets done.
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Author: Guest
I had hoped to be able to imagine the life of the ancient Catalhoyuk community. Instead, Balter emphasises the lives and works of the modern Archaeologists. It was a good read, but I learned precious little about what I really wanted to know. There were too many "year book pictures" and too few photos of artifacts. It portrayed the dig as a kind of Archaeology Camp. I am glad they had so much fun, but what did they find out?
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Author: Guest
May 2005, the Smithsonian Magazine ran an article by Michael Balter, about the subject of his new work, THE GODDESS AND THE BULL. Having now read the article and Balter's book about the ancient archeological site known as Catalhöyük, I can say the book title is catchy but a bit misleading. If you are looking for evidence of Goddess worship at Catalhöyük, you won't hear much about the topic from the current dig participants, according to Balter. Even though the dig web site apparently boasts an image of "her" and contemporary excavators have uncovered dozens of little female figurines similar to those found many years ago by James Mellaart, who made the site famous when he arrived at the opposite conclusion - that the inhabitants honored a Goddess, the current excavators consider "her" a joke.
Catalhöyük lies in South-Central Turkey due east of Hacilar, which Mellaart also excavated at one point in his distinguished career. Ian Hodder, the current director of the Catalhöyük "dig" was allowed to reopen the site years after Mellaart's ignominious and unfair removal by the Turkish government - largely owing to politics. When Hodder and company arrived at the site they found the "south" area Mellaart and his team had excavated in the 1960s had become badly eroded and overgrown with vegetation, so the new team has mostly concentrated it's efforts on a more northerly area of the 32 acre site in addition to cleaning up the old excavation as they went along.
Mellaart described Catalhöyük as "Neolithic" - which in the 1960s was identified as the period in human history when human settlement became associated with the invention of agriculture and the domestication of animals. According to Balter both the concept and the operational definition of this term remain unresolved (which came first settlements or agriculture?) and archeologists like Hodder dispute its traditional use.
Much occurred over the intervening years to separate the efforts of Mellaart and Hodder. First, the new Archeology was born, then the "new" variant was revised into a newer archeology led by Hodder. Balter describes this newer archeology as practiced by the current crop of excavators and specialists working at Catalhöyük as `post-processual' archeology making everything that went before `processual'. Balter spends about one third of the book trying to explain Hodder's academic stance and how it differs from other archeological positions, as he, a travel-writer and journalist, understands it. He drops references to Levi-Strauss, Marx, and other scholars without really discussing why their thoughts were important to Hodder (He may not know, but he obviously believes Hodder is the "good guy" in his squabble with the "establishment). Another annoying tic of Balther's is his continuous use of the adjective "feminist" to describe many of the female participants in the current dig as if this it is relevant (if it is why?).
It was not until I moved into the later stages of his tale (Balther is called the "project biographer" by the team at Catalhöyük) that I began to recall discussions in structural anthropology classes about the `synchronic' and `diachronic' and "taking each case as it comes", i.e. not using the dynamics of an old case to explain a new case." At that point, I thought I began to understand what Balter was trying to say Hodder was thinking and saying and doing (maybe I don't, if so I am in good company, apparently).
According to Balter, archeologists became concerned with "how do we know what we know" in the 1970s and 1980s (sociologists have long grappled with this concern -- French ethnographers like Levi-Strauss consider(ed) themselves 'sociologists'). The problem can be expressed as: whenever you perceive something what you see (your perception) is influenced by your "categories of understanding" or "world view" or "classificatory system" to use the phrase I learned when I studied with a student of Rodney Needham. These preconceptions influence how you interpret "facts" or "do science". This begs the question, if a group of archeologists was attempting to demonstrate their "new" approach was really different and could produce "better" results, would they arrive at the same conclusions as the "old" archeologists?
Hodder's interest in Marx, who pointed out that experiences shape beliefs, mislead me for a moment, as he was a historian and Balther says the post-processsualists eschew history-which is confusing because Balther keeps bringing up change i.e. cause and effect or settlement-->agriculture, which is processual or historical.
In spite of some of the long passages detailing every contributor's background I enjoyed the book because I love Balter's discussion about archaebotany, which clearly shows improvements in forensics in the field. What the inhabitants of Catalhöyük ate may have made them what they were- whether it be emmer wheat, domesticated wheat, wild bulls or domesticated cattle. What that was, and whether or not they gave thanks to a God or Goddess for their bounty, is not clear.
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Author: Guest
I read this book at the suggestion of a friend, even though I had no particular interest either in archaeology or Turkey, where it's set; before reading The Goddess and the Bull, I had only a vague understanding of the difference between the Neolithic and Paleolithic periods. I had barely heard of Catalhoyuk, Michael Balter's subject, a Neolithic village that was inhabited for roughly 1000 years.
And yet, Balter lured me from the very beginning with a profoundly intriguing question: "Why did humans bother to invent agriculture and settle down in such close quarters, instead of continuing to romp across the landscape, hunting and gathering?"
As interesting as is Balter's attempt to understand and describe the lives of those who originally lived at Catalhoyuk-as many as 8000 at once!-I also enjoyed the parallel tale about the archaeologists from around the world who have devoted years of their lives to excavating the 9500-year-old village.
Though Balter sometimes gets bogged down in minutiae, I heartily recommend this book, especially to those with an interest in Turkey, the Neolithic period, or archaelogy.
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Author: Guest
One of the high points of my life was standing on the great mound of Catalhoyuk, looking down into the excavations. Catalhoyuk was the world's first real town, with the first lavish widespread art, and the first of many other things. It is also a fascinating and mysterious site. The many female figurines were thought by the site's first excavator, James Mellaart, to be representations of the Mother Goddess, a popular deity in historic times in Anatolia; bull figures and paintings seem to foreshadow the bull cults of the historic Mediterranean (reaching their final, degenerate form in the modern bullfight). Mellaart was an incurable romantic, and his flights of speculation have been questioned. So in the 1990s Ian Hodder, also a romantic and a lover of speculation, began to dig at Catalhoyuk, to see what really happened.
This book tells the whole story, at a very accessible, popular level. The author's target audience is shown by the fact that he feels it necessary to explain that Cambridge and Oxford are England's two leading universities. This book would be ideal for a bright high school student or college undergrad interested in archaeology. (In fact, I'll probably give it to my nephew, a freshman anthro major.) I had expected a full report on all the seeds, bones, plaster fragments, and so on. Instead, this book focuses on people--the ancient ones, but, much more, the modern ones. It is an amazing insight into real archaeology and real archaeologists. Some of those "general readers" probably thought of archaeologists as either Professor Dryasdust or coolly rational Indiana Jones types; they will be surprised to read of the intensity of loves, hates, and other emotions displayed herein. In fact, archaeologists are passionate people. You have to be passionate to spend day after day working in blazing sun and choking dust, with no payoff other than the hope of finding out something about the human condition and the human spirit. (I know some of the people who appear in this book. They are accurately and sympathetically portrayed here.)
One particularly good aspect of the book is the author's excellent presentation of the relevant archaeological theories, especially processual archaeology and Ian Hodder's "post-processual" challenge to it. This is fairly hard material, but the author makes it beautifully clear without excessive simplification. Processualists concentrate on subsistence and ordinary life; post-processualists concentrate on, or at least look deeply into, how ancient people thought, felt, philosophized, and communicated. Sometimes the processualists seem to think that one can get nothing but foodways from the record. Sometimes post-processualists make ancient people sound all too similar to elite French philosophers of the late 20th century. There is a theme in this book (not, alas, discussed quite enough) of Hodder's gradual tempering of his post-processualism to deal with the hard reality of food remains and garbage dumps.
This book is by a science reporter, not an archaeologist, which helps the writing style, but also leads to some problems. Theories of the rise of agriculture do not fare well. Some important ones are missed--notably the late R. S. MacNeish's theory emphasizing trade, and Joy McCorriston's brilliant eclectic theorizing. Those theories were not much considered by Hodder, so perhaps they need not figure here, but, still--I'd have liked to see them. Agriculture was invented in at least four areas besides the Near East, and good theories should try to explain all these inventions. A rather far-fetched theory by one Cauvin is featured here (because Hodder played with it for a while), but even if it were not over the wall, it would apply only to the Near East, so as a general theory of agriculture it is inadequate. Problematic, also, are countless small mistakes or not-quite-rights--each one trivial in itself, but they add up. Some are minor (such as misspelling desiccation as "dessication"). More serious is the failure to show the difference between Turkish dotted and undotted i. These are different letters (roughly, dotted i represents the "ee" sound, undotted i the "uh" sound). Then there are theories that should be questioned more: Marshall Sahlins' "original affluent society" idea, the whole idea of sedentization and coming-together as some huge new deal (actually it was very widespread in prehistoric times), and others.
That said, this is a fine book, and the intended readers will not lose much because of such minor flaws.
In the end, we need both processual and post-processual approaches. We need to stay grounded in hard material things we can study, such as food remains. But we need to think a little. I still think those female figurines are goddesses (but, contra Mellaart, they do not imply a matriarchal, peaceful society, any more than goddesses did in early historic Anatolia). The mysterious, powerful, intensely evocative art of Catalhoyuk remains one of the earliest really great triumphs of the human spirit. As such, it should be known to everyone. It is a vital part of the human heritage. Thanks to Michael Balter (as to Mellaart before him) for making it accessible to a wide audience.
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