Paléorient, vol. 37.1, p. 111-122 © CNRS ÉDITIONS 2011 Manuscrit reçu le 2 février 2011, accepté le 10 mai 2011
THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN THE NEOLITHIC
OF THE MIDDLE EAST AND ANATOLIA
WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE
TO ÇATAL HÖYÜK
I. HODDER
Abstract: This paper considers some of the arguments in Cauvin’s book Naissance des divinités, Naissance de l’agriculture in the
light of new research conducted at Çatalhöyük regarding the role of religion in the Neolithic. This research has brought together
anthropologists, philosophers and religious scholars to work with archaeologists in answering four questions all of which have been
inspired by Cauvin’s work. The questions deal with (1) the definition and archaeological recognition of religion, (2) the relationships
between religion and social and economic change, (3) the role of new forms of human agency in the domestication of animals, and (4)
the part played by symbolism of violence and death in the formation of settled village life. The evidence and discussion of Çatalhöyük
lead to new insights in all these domains.
Résumé: À la lumière des recherches récentes à Çatalhöyük, relatives au le rôle de la religion, cet article examine quelques-unes
des hypothèses exposées dans l’ouvrage de Cauvin, Naissance des divinités, Naissance de l’agriculture. Ces études ont rassemblé
anthropologues, philosophes et spécialistes de la religion pour s’attacher, avec la collaboration des archéologues, à répondre à
quatre questions, toutes inspirées par l’œuvre de Cauvin. Elles concernent: 1) la définition et la reconnaissancen archéologique de la
religion; 2) les relations entre religion et transformation sociale et économique; 3) le rôle des nouvelles formes d’action humaine dans
la domestication des animaux; 4) la part du symbolisme de la violence et de la mort dans la formation des communautés villageoises.
Les témoignages et les débats apportés par les travaux à Çatalhöyük fournissent de nouveaux points de vue dans tous ces domaines.
Keywords: Çatalhöyük; Göbekli; Neolithic; Middle East; Domestication; Symbolism; Religion.
Mots-clés: Çatalhöyük; Göbekli; Néolithique; Moyen-Orient; Domestication; Symbolisme; Religion.
Jacques Cauvin’s ideas, particularly as presented in his
book Naissance des divinités, Naissance de l’agriculture,1
have only gained in importance as new data and theories have
emerged. As regards new data, remarkable new discoveries at
sites such as Göbekli and Körtik Tepe reinforce the importance
of the subtitle of Cauvin’s book, La Révolution des symboles
au Néolithique. The new sites show that the appearance of the
Neolithic in the Middle East is associated with an explosion
of symbolism not unlike the cultural explosion that marks the
start of the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe. As regards new theo-
1. CAUVIN, 1994 and 2000 (translation).
ries, a cognitive aspect of the transition has been foregrounded
in the work of Donald2
and Renfrew and Scarre,3
adding to
previous work suggesting the importance of the social4
and the
symbolic5
dimensions. This is not to ignore the increasingly
strong arguments for climatic change as a relevant factor,6
2. DONALD, 1991.
3. RENFREW and SCARRE, 1998.
4. E.g., BENDER, 1978.
5. HODDER, 1990.
6. E.g., the special issue of Paléorient 23,2, 1997, “Paléoenvironnement et
sociétés humaines au Moyen-Orient de 20 000 BP à 6 000 BP” edited
by Paul Sanlaville.
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but it remains possible to argue, as Cauvin did repeatedly and
vigorously, that such factors are not adequate in themselves to
explain the origins of agriculture.
Cauvin’s argument concerning the first formation of settled
villages was neatly encapsulated in the French title of the
book—the birth of agriculture is linked to the birth of divinities.
In summary, the increased intervention in the environment
associated with agriculture implied to Cauvin a human agency
that is derived from envisaging the power of personal divinities.
To be more specific, he saw it as very important that the revolution
of symbols occurred before the first agricultural communities.
He saw the Khiamian in the Levantine core as key to this
argument since it indicated “a change in collective psychology
which must have preceded and engendered all the others in the
matter of the process of neolithisation”.7
In the Khiamian there
is already a symbolism of raptors, but especially of the bull
and a woman. Reading backwards from Çatalhöyük and from
historical Mesopotamia and Egypt, he saw this symbolism and
its later development in PPNA as centering around a Goddess
flanked by a male partner in the form of a bull. The emergence
of divinities in human form was not, he argued, found in the
Natufian, nor in the Upper Palaeolithic. In the latter, for example,
there were collections of mammoths shown in the FrancoCantabrian
cave art, but not a mammoth god. The Neolithic
images were of supreme beings and they suggested a new psychology
of the human being dominated by a divine personified
force which looked down. The bull was seen as representing
a masculine anthropomorphic god, and by confronting this,
man’s virility became productive and civilizing.8
Humans thus
could see themselves as separate from external reality9
and then
act upon it so as to transform and domesticate. The revolution
in action (the domestication of plants) resulted from the revolution
of symbols. The symbolic shift to the woman/bull system
occurred before cattle were dominant in the middle Euphrates.
The initial change was “a purely mental development”.10
Hence
the title of the book: it was the birth of divinities in human form
that created the agency and the alienated sense of self11
that
were necessary for agriculture.
A question that is immediately raised by Cauvin’s account
is “what causes the mental shift?” Cauvin did not appear to
answer this question, except for a passing reference to some
group psychology of dissatisfaction.12
At times he argued
7. CAUVIN, 2000: 23.
8. Ibid.: 124.
9. Ibid.: 209.
10. Ibid.: 32.
11. Ibid.: 209.
12. Ibid.: 65.
against a single cause for domestication. Rather, he saw13
a
continual cycle of interactions between population size, climate,
collective life, domestication, and the imagination. But
most of the time he was so concerned to react against climatic,
economic, and power factors that he got backed into the corner
of arguing for a causal and chronological primacy for the
psycho-cultural. The mental shift came first and was the most
important. But by so separating off the mental from all other
domains it became impossible to explain the symbolic fluorescence
at all. The imagination and the group psychology just
changed, for no apparent reason. In this way he departed from
the medieval historians of the Annales School that he cited
(Duby, Le Goff and Dumézil) and unwittingly embraced a
reductionist position.
Right at the end of the postscript to his 2000 book, Cauvin
appeared to realise that he had gone too far and he apologised
for putting too much emphasis on the symbolic at the expense
of the economic. He said14
that he may have over-emphasised
the symbolic as a strategic reaction against a pervasive and
dominant economic view. Instead, the symbolic and the economic
“are simply two faces, interior and exterior, of a single
revolution”.15
The primacy of the mental or symbolic shift is in
any case difficult since the domestication of plants and animals
is a long drawn-out process with no clear beginning. It is thus
difficult to say which came first, domestication or the symbolic
revolution.
Similar conclusions are reached if we consider Cauvin’s
account of later developments in the Neolithic of the Middle
East. Cauvin treated at some length the spread of the PPNB.
He saw this as a movement of people from the middle Euphrates,
sometimes integrating into local cultures, and introducing
rectangular architecture, herding, and the ‘skull cult’ into,
for example, Anatolia and the central and southern Levant
between 8600 BC and 7000 BC. He then discussed a further
spread of the Neolithic in the later PPNB and Pottery Neolithic
between 7500 BC and 6300 BC. This was seen as a ‘great exodus’
of people who now moved into semi-arid landscapes and
into Cyprus. He described the spread as a colonisation, even
messianic in tone.16
Once again, Cauvin shunned climatic, population pressure
and economic explanations for these expansionist movements.
In moving towards a psycho-cultural alternative, he described
the internal cultural characteristics that made the PPNB a
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.: 220.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.: 205.
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‘conquering culture’.17
He took various aspects of the PPNB
and identified an underlying whole. First, there was the bull
cult which showed a male virility confronting and civilizing.
Second, he drew into this masculine theme the symbolic prestige
invested in projectile points. Third, the domestication of
the goat was linked to an imagination in which virility was
expressed in terms of a confrontation with animals. Fourth, the
shift to the rectangular house was fitted into the same scheme,
in that the rectangular was seen as more artificial, more
imposed, more a conscious expression of self than the circular
house form.18
The whole underlying the PPNB was this central
involvement of the male, unlike the earlier emphasis on female
figurines. And it was this virility which explained the expansionism.
He talked further of the psychological character of
this cultural whole–that it contained an existential malaise, an
impatience that moved material progress forward.19
As with the initial adoption of agriculture, one is bound
to ask what caused the shift in culture and psychology in the
PPNB. Again the psycho-cultural was given primacy over the
material and the economic. As a result it became difficult to
explain change in the psycho-cultural realm.
THE ROLE OF RELIGION AT ÇATALHÖYÜK
Largely in response to the arguments made by Cauvin, we
have recently been using a grant from the Templeton Foundation
to explore the role of religion at Çatalhöyük and to examine
further the questions that he raised in his seminal book
and related works. The first phase of this new work inspired
by Cauvin has been completed20
and I would like to describe
the results here. The Templeton project involved an international
study group of archaeologists but also anthropologists
and philosophers of religion. This group of scholars came to
the site each summer for three years and attempted to explore
questions about religion in relation to specific data and the new
results from the site.21
Our discussions centered around four questions, all of
which take various aspects of Cauvin’s arguments and subject
them to scrutiny.
17. Ibid.: 122.
18. Ibid.: 32.
19. Ibid.: 205.
20. HODDER, 2010.
21. HODDER, 1996, 2000, 2005a, b and c and 2006; HODDER (ed.),
2007.
1 – DEFINITION AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL
RECOGNITION OF RELIGION
What is religion and how can archaeologists recognize the
spiritual, religious and transcendent in early time periods?
The group of Templeton scholars engaged at first hand with
the materials from the site and asked questions of the archaeologists.
Detailed discussions in the laboratories at the site,
regarding obsidian, pottery and figurines or plants, animal
bones and human remains led to reflexive dialogue about the
degree to which a separate spiritual or religious part of life
could be discerned, especially in these early time periods.
At theoretical and comparative levels, problems immediately
arose regarding whether it was helpful to talk of a separate
arena of life at Çatalhöyük that could be called religious.
Sociological and anthropological debate has demonstrated the
difficulties of defining a separate religious sphere in certain
forms of society. M. Bloch22
bluntly stated that “I am confident
that there was no religion in Çatalhöyük”, meaning that the
houses themselves were both religious and domestic: there was
no separate religious sphere. The sociologist R. Bellah23
has
argued that the term ‘religion’ was a relatively recent concept,
and that ‘transcendent’ was a term that was given very specific
meanings in different religions. Scholars from religious studies
and philosophy often take a post-foundational approach
and argue for diversity. For example, Shults24
and van Huys-
steen25
argued for religion as an emergent property of complex
human systems. Their accounts of religion remained nuanced
and contextual. And yet they saw value in continued use of the
term ‘religion’ as a general category.
The philosopher of religion van Huyssteen26
did not see
a clearly demarcated religious domain in the Neolithic at
Çatalhöyük. The neurological capacity for different forms of
consciousness was linked by him to the human ability to symbolize.
Human spiritual and religious experience can be understood
as an emergent consequence of the symbolic capacity in
humans. Religion is about playing out specific and embodied
worldviews within this universal framework. L. Shults27
suggested
that religious theorists no longer deal with an opposition
between matter and spirit. Referring to emergent complexity
theory, he saw spirituality as an emergent form of self-awareness.
The spiritual is associated with the experience of ulti-
22. BLOCH, 2010: 161.
23. BELLAH, 1964.
24. SHULTS, 2010.
25. VAN HUYSSTEEN, 2010.
26. Ibid.
27. SHULTS, 2010.
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mate boundaries or boundedness. Spirituality at Çatalhöyük
was not a separate domain. The hiding and revealing process
(for example hiding and revealing paintings or obsidian caches
or human skulls) suggested a concern with ultimate boundaries.
The ridges and boundaries on the floors and platforms that
defined everyday activity in the Çatalhöyük house were linked
to the dead buried beneath the floors, and in this way they were
linked to the ultimate—perhaps to the ancestors.
Anthropologists such as Bloch,28
Webb Keane29
and Peter
Pels30
were wary of the value of the term religion, which they
saw as inextricably linked to particular developed social and
institutional forms and particular modes of power. But they
nevertheless were keen to develop an account of phenomena
that others might categorize as religious. Thus Bloch31
discussed
houses, roles, corporate groups and the transcendental
at Çatalhöyük rather than religion. Bloch32
has also suggested
an approach to religion that sees it as deriving from, and continuous
with, the general human capacity to imagine other
worlds.33
In these ways his position, at the general level, is
close to that of Shults and van Huyssteen.34
Bloch35
describes
humans and chimpanzees as having complex social worlds.
Chimpanzees engage in much Machiavellian politicking—
they have what Bloch terms a transactional social. But they
do not have the transcendental social—that is roles that continue
on beyond the individual. It is the ability to imagine a
social structure that endures, and to treat elders as honored
previous holders of roles, and indeed to treat ancestors as holders
of roles, that separates humans from chimpanzees. This
exposition by Bloch is highly relevant to Çatalhöyük and to the
origins of settled life in towns, because the evidence strongly
suggests that a key concern at this time period was indeed the
endurance of roles, of structure, and of the centrality of ances-
tors.36
The transcendental imaginings that are seen in the art
and symbolism suggest a social world concerned with establishing
the longer-term social relations that are at the heart of
agricultural and settled town life. But more generally, we can
see the possibility of religion as an emergent property of the
human capacity to imagine—as seen in Upper Palaeolithic art
well before the agricultural revolution.37
28. BLOCH, 2010.
29. KEANE, 2010.
30. PELS, 2010.
31. BLOCH, 2010.
32. BLOCH, 2008.
33. Ibid. and 2010.
34. See above.
35. BLOCH, 2008.
36. See HODDER, 2007.
37. See VAN HUYSSTEEN, 2006.
One example of the assumptions that often, unhelpfully,
travel with the term ‘religion’ is that religion is always about
belief. Talal Asad38
has argued that historically anthropologists
had come to understand religion as propositional, yet some religion
is about proper practice rather than being propositional.
Anthropologists now accept that much religion is not about
propositions. However, even ritual practice involves some sense
of belief. Belief and meaning do not need to be separate and
propositional. They can be embodied and embedded. A different
though comparable distinction is made by Whitehouse39
in
his discussion of modes of religiosity.
Keane40
is another anthropologist wary of using the term
‘religion’ and seeking to find other, general and comparative,
ways of describing what others mean by religious phenomena.
He argues that what looks to us like religion emerges from
convergences between different kinds of practice which are not
necessarily ‘religious’ in their own right, but become so when
they are combined. He suggests that there is evidence at Çatalhöyük
of the general processes of ‘marking’ and ‘absence’.
Marking is a way of setting some things as apart, special, different,
difficult. The most obvious examples at Çatalhöyük
are the kills of dangerous wild animals, the associated feasts,
and the display of the resulting bucrania. One source of the
difficulty associated with such marking is absence. Absence
refers to the ways in which some practices produce an experience
that there is something beyond experience that is still
relevant. This something beyond is not just gone; it impinges
on us somehow. An example at Çatalhöyük is provided by
the wild boar mandibles buried in the walls—absent (hidden)
but still there and relevant to the lived practices of feasts and
wild animal kills. Another example is the human bodies
buried beneath the floors that remain relevant to social life
so that the graves are re-opened and skulls removed and circulated.
Obsidian and stalagmites deposited in caches and
graves also produce the effect of absence. Practices that produce
the effect of absence display people’s control or power
over absence and presence, and the transitions between them.
Marking and absence work against the background of habit—the
routine flow of daily life. In the Çatalhöyük house,
marking, absence and habit all come together and affect one
another. Life may be a continuum between unconscious routine
and conscious acts or events, but certain practices sharpen
the differences between the extremes of that continuum, to
social effect.
38. ASAD, 1993.
39. WHITEHOUSE, 2004.
40. KEANE, 2010.
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Fig. 1 – Wild bull horns set into clay and plaster pillars
in the northeast corner of Building 77 at Çatalhöyük.
The approach outlined by Keane, and the related perspective
of Pels,41
seem very useful for archaeological discussion.
The marking, hiding and making absent of things has
long been a focus of archaeological interest in the religious,
whether it be Renfrew’s42
account of things that attract attention
and so mark, or Bradley’s43
discussion of ritual conspicuous
deposition of metal objects (hidden or made absent) in
rivers and bogs, or Tilley’s44
description of the marking of the
landscape with rock art that symbolizes absent or distant animals
or boats, or the common notion that objects that are carried
over longer distances often have special significance or
value that is manipulated socially.45
In relation to Çatalhöyük
the approach is very productive, partly because the marking
and the absence can be set within the context of habitual routines.
Because of the embedding of symbolism and ritual in
domestic life at the site it is unhelpful to talk of a separate
religious sphere, and yet it is clear that we need a way to talk
of religious experience at the site, however much it is embedded
in daily life. Thus the ridges on the house floors mark
differences between activity areas. Bull horn pilasters mark
the edges of platforms under which people are buried as in
Building 77 (fig. 1) so that the platform is marked in relation
to daily activities on the floors and so that the human bones
buried beneath the platform are both made present (by the
bull horn marking) and hidden or made absent. The whole
41. PELS, 2010.
42. RENFREW, 1985.
43. BRADLEY, 1990.
44. TILLEY, 1997.
45. SHERRATT, 1981.
social process in the house can be described as one in which
absences are marked, and the beyond is constructed in the
midst of the practices of daily life.
It is clear that there were rules at Çatalhöyük about what
could be done in different areas of the house.46
Adults were
buried in the northern part of the house but not in the southern
part. Pottery that was used to cook food in the southern
part of the house was never placed in a grave. Different types
of matting were placed on different types of platform. There
was social control over what could be done in different parts
of the house, and over the transitions between those spaces.
The practices that produced the effects of absence displayed
people’s control or power. The bull horns marked the dead
beneath the platform and made them present. The obsidian
cached below the floor could from time to time be dug up and
used. The skulls of the ancestor could from time to time be dug
up, used and re-deposited to found a new house. In all these
ways the control over absence and presence, and the transitions
between them, were integrally linked to social power — perhaps
between elders and youngers.
But it is important to recognize that the ways in which
marking and absence are manipulated and experienced vary
through time and in different contexts. How people experience
absence and the beyond varies. Whitehouse47
describes these
different ways of experiencing as “modes of religiosity”. Most
rituals are either high or low arousal. All low frequency rituals
are high intensity (Whitehouse terms these imagistic) so that
the experiences are burned into people’s minds. People then
reflect on what happened over long periods of time. Low intensity,
high frequency ritual (termed doctrinal) is more closely
associated with the transmission of doctrine and knowledge,
and it often involves persuasive leaders. At first sight, Çatalhöyük
would seem to fit into the high frequency, low intensity
category since the same images, symbols and practices
are repeated over and over again in the houses. But there also
seem to be cases of low frequency, high arousal events such
as the feasts associated with wild bulls. Whitehouse and Hod-
der48
have explored the value of this model for Çatalhöyük.
There seem to be good grounds for arguing that 1,400 years of
occupation at the site saw a gradual shift from a more imagistic
to a more doctrinal mode. Much the same argument could be
made for the Neolithic of Anatolia and the Middle East more
generally. The PPNB often seems associated with high arousal
and remarkable events such as the deposition of human figures
46. HODDER, 2006.
47. WHITEHOUSE, 2004.
48. HODDER, 2010.
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at ‘Ain Ghazal,49
the plastering of skulls at Jericho and other
sites50
or the impressive carved stone stele with dangerous
wild animals at Göbekli.51
And yet by the Pottery Neolithic
throughout the area there is less evidence of obvious and distinctive
ritual practices and a wider dissemination of symbolism
into pottery decoration and stamp seals. Evaluation of this
claim for a broader shift in modes of religiosity at this time
will have to await further research, but the overall effect of
the approach offered by Whitehouse is to shift archaeologists
from identifying religion as a separate sphere to focusing on
practices, effects and experiences.
Another approach to identifying different religious modes
is Nakamura’s52
contrast between magic and religion. It is difficult
to provide stable distinctions between religion and magic,
but the latter term is often used to describe practical acts that
lie outside or alongside religious schemes. While it is difficult
to draw lines between magic, science and religion, it is often
the contrasts with the other two terms that define magic. Magic
is part of religion but it also transgresses. The normal religious
themes at Çatalhöyük (the clay plastered bucrania, burial, dangerous
wild things in the clay house) can be contrasted with
unusual clusters of objects. These clusters include obsidian,
antler, pottery fragments, crystal, pigment, special stones or
axe heads, stalactites, a baby leg, fossils and so on. Deposits
of such objects often occur in liminal spaces and times,
for example in the construction or abandonment deposits in a
house. They can be termed magical in that they seem linked to
particular practices that stand against the usual religious repertoire
and can be seen as having a more direct instrumental
character.
In summary, there can be disagreement about whether the
term ‘religious’ should be used at all in the context of discussion
about the types of society associated with Çatalhöyük,
but it is clear that a more applicable approach is one that
focuses on marking or dealing with ‘the beyond’—defined as
absence, ultimate boundaries or the transcendental. In smallscale
societies, and at Çatalhöyük in particular, this focus on
‘the beyond’ is often embedded within forms of social and
material life and does not constitute a separate institutional
sphere.
49. ROLLEFSON, 2000.
50. BONOGOFSKY, 2005.
51. SCHMIDT, 2006.
52. NAKAMURA, 2010.
2 – RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN RELIGION
AND SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGE
Are changes in spiritual life and religious ritual a necessary
prelude to the social and economic changes that lead to
‘civilization’?
This question raised by Cauvin’s work can be explored in
relation to two aspects of the data from the Middle East and
Çatalhöyük. The first aspect concerns the evidence from the
Middle East as a whole, and deals with the factors associated
with the formation of settled villages from the 11th millennium
BC onwards. But the claim can also be explored in relation to
the domestication of cattle at Çatalhöyük itself in the 7th millennium
BC.
In relation to the first, more general question the new evidence
from Göbekli Tepe is particularly compelling.53
There
is much scholarly fascination with this site, not only with the
richness of its symbolism but also with the evidence that such
elaboration and complexity could occur so early, before fully
domesticated plants and animals. The site seems to invite the
speculation that communities first came together around largescale
and intense rituals before they intensified their subsistence
economies to such an extent that genetic change occurred
in crops and flocks. But it is important to recognize that genetic
change in the process of domesticating plants and animals was
preceded by the intensive collecting, cultivating and herding54
of genetically wild species. Some degree of settled agglomerations,
sometimes associated with ritual structures, occur from
the Natufian onwards in the southern Levant.55
Göbekli Tepe
is a remarkable site and it raises in a very stark fashion the
possibility of a very early role for symbolism and ritual in the
formation of settled agricultural life. But it is itself only part of
a larger and gradual process.
Given the answer to question 1 above, a close tie is to be
expected between spiritual and religious life and increasing
social and economic complexity. Different forms of religion
are appropriate to different contexts (so that it is not possible
to have Moses in aboriginal Australia). Shults56
argues that
changes in symbolic thought probably were a prelude to the
major changes that led to complex ‘civilizations’. It seems possible
that the idea of living together came before the town or
settled village—the idea of togetherness preceded the concrete
realization. Picking apart causal chains is always fraught with
53. SCHMIDT, 2006.
54. FULLER, 2007.
55. KUIJT, 2000; HODDER, 2007.
56. SHULTS, 2010.
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difficulties and the most likely answer to the second question
is that religious and socio-economic life were and are inextricably
linked. Thus in contrast to Cauvin’s views, religion
accompanied and made possible domesticated and settled life
rather than being an originator.
There is possible evidence that at the more specific level
at Çatalhöyük, changes in the symbolic manipulation of cattle
occurred before biological evidence of domestication of cattle.
We await the new evidence from the site to see at what
point cattle were domesticated—in the upper levels of the East
Mound or only in the later West Mound. But there is certainly
a decrease in the availability or use of wild cattle in the upper
levels of the Neolithic East Mound, and also in the upper levels
we see new forms of symbolic relationship between humans
and animals, with for example domesticated animals being
buried with humans. It would be possible to argue that the presence
of wild bull horns in many contexts in houses in the lower
and middle levels at Çatalhöyük indicates the symbolic control
of wild animals that were domesticated (whether locally or
brought from elsewhere) in the upper levels.
But how did the religious and the economic interact in relation
to cattle at Çatalhöyük? In terms of the framework presented
by Keane57
and summarized above, cattle were marked
at Çatalhöyük by killing, feasting and display, which made
human agency over them a focus of attention and interest. This
could have been a factor in the domestication process: various
ways of marking cattle as foci of special attention drew attention
to what humans could do to them, as Cauvin argued. Thus
the symbolic and religious marking might have accelerated
whatever incipient domestication was already going on. By way
of contrast, sheep and goat had already been domesticated at
the start of the occupation at Çatalhöyük. They were thus less
useful in the production of absence—and indeed they played
little to no role in the symbolism and religious practices at the
site. Indeed, one might ask why cattle were domesticated so
late at Çatalhöyük and elsewhere in the Middle East? After, all
sheep and goat had been domesticated for one to two millennia
before cattle were domesticated. At Çatalhöyük it remains possible
that the cattle were specifically ‘kept’ wild so that they
could play their role in the production of absence, the imagining
and manipulation of the beyond. The houses in the early to
middle levels of the site depended on this social construction
of difference and otherness in transcendental experience.
Overall, there is much both general and specific data to support
the notion that changes in spiritual life and religious ritual
accompanied the social and economic changes that produced
57. KEANE, 2010.
settled life based on domestic resources. But the second question
also asks whether it was a necessary prelude and accompaniment.
Settled agricultural life involved a whole series of
new structures and constraints on social and economic life.
Longer term relationships had to be set up to deal with the
delayed returns from the investments of labor. There had to be
ways of dealing with disputes in the large villages and towns.
There had to be mechanisms for the passing down of property.
All these changes involved new conceptions of humans in relation
to each other, and in relation to the environment and its
resources. The new structures had to be imagined in a spiritual
realm alongside their envisioning in practice.
Some additional support for the overall conclusions at Çatalhöyük
has been provided in the last few years in the excavations
conducted by D. Baird and T. Watkins at the nearby sites
of Boncuklu and Pınarbaşı.58
These sites stretch back to the
13th millennium BC, and they show, especially at Boncuklu,
the very early development of many of the special features of
Çatalhöyük. Boncuklu has the division of houses into south
and north parts, burials beneath floors, and elaborate installations
on walls. And yet the site is small and low density. So
it is clear that all the elaborate ritual and symbolism does not
suddenly appear at Çatalhöyük as the result of agglomeration.
Rather, the symbolism already existed prior to the aggregation
on the Konya Plain at Çatalhöyük. The earlier small dispersed
settlements were abandoned as people moved into the big center.
But the inhabitants brought with them a symbolic and religious
world through which they envisaged and built the town.
3 – ROLE OF NEW FORMS OF HUMAN AGENCY
IN THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS
Do human forms take on a central role in the spirit world
in the early Holocene, and does this centrality lead to new
conceptions of human agency that themselves provide the possibility
for the domestication of plants and animals?
This claim derived from Cauvin’s work is largely a historical
question to be answered by reference to archaeological data
and is less amenable to broad anthropological and theological
debate. As with the second question, it seems likely that the
domestication of plants and animals involved changed conceptions
of the world and that these changed conceptions were
embedded within other realms of thought. In particular, the
domestication of animals would have involved new conceptions
of the relationships between humans and animals which must
58. BAIRD, 2007 and 2008.
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have been linked to other changes in thought at the time. The
archaeological evidence suggests that in contrast to the cave
paintings and other symbolism of the Upper Palaeolithic in
Europe, the imagery from Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük indicates
a human domination of wild animals. At Göbekli Tepe,
scorpions, spiders, snakes, vultures, foxes, lions and bulls are
shown on stele that are undoubtedly anthropomorphic, with
hands and arms shown and in one case a belt. Many of these
animals were never domesticated and yet they are shown in a
context dominated by large human figures. At Çatalhöyük, on
the other hand, some of the animals shown in the paintings
would later show morphological change indicating domestication.
There are baiting and teasing scenes involving bulls and
wild boar, but stags and bears are also shown baited. There are
a number of figurines (clay and stone) showing humans associated
with leopards or sitting on wild animals, and of course
the most famous image from the site shows a woman flanked
by possible leopards, her hands apparently resting on their
heads in a dominating position. Many of the paintings have
been interpreted as showing humans wearing leopard skins.
It seems reasonable to argue that in these cases human agents
were able symbolically to dominate wild animals. This conceptual
domination would have been helpful as the process of
actual domination of animals in terms of their domestication
got under way.
In terms of Keane’s59
account of religion in terms of marking
and absence it is possible to explore how such processes
have historical consequences. Keane60
has argued that marking
and absence both sharpen people’s awareness of their own
agency or the agency of other beings. In other words, whether
people are claiming agency for themselves, for example by killing
dangerous animals, or displacing it onto others, for example
by treating birds as spirits, they are objectifying agency.
By objectifying agency, people can reflect on it. This makes
it possible for them to transform habit into purposeful actions.
It allows people to act in inventive, or morally responsible, or
simply audacious new ways. If the Neolithic can be seen as a
revolution in human abilities and efforts to intervene in the
world, then self-consciousness about agency itself is a crucial
part of the process.
59. KEANE, 2010.
60. Ibid.
4 – PART PLAYED BY SYMBOLISM OF VIOLENCE
AND DEATH IN THE FORMATION OF SETTLED
VILLAGE LIFE
Do violence and death act as the foci of transcendent religious
experience during the transitions of the early Holocene
in the Middle East, and are such themes central to the creation
of social life in the first large agglomerations of people?
As noted above it was a key component of Cauvin’s
account that violence played a central role in the PPNB. In this
fourth question, the Templeton project considered the broader
question of the role of violent imagery throughout the Neolithic,
both in relation to males and females and in relation to
death.
Violent imagery is seen at Göbekli Tepe (in the animals
with bared teeth) and at Çatalhöyük (for example, the wild boar
teeth and vulture beaks placed in walls). Hodder and Meskell61
have described other examples from eastern Turkey and the
northern Levant, and the rather fewer examples in the southern
Levant. Shults62
has attempted to understand this imagery
in terms of the intensification it produced. He argued that in
such moments of intense or heightened experience there was
an awareness of the need for a new understanding of the self
in relation to others. The participant was thus released to find a
place in the world in a new way. The productive aspects of violence,
rather than negative connotations, are often overlooked
by archaeologists. Indeed, the very term ‘violence’ might be
unhelpful — as it may be other aspects of what we perceive as
violent scenes that may be more salient. Thus a leopard claw
may be kept and deposited in a burial63
because it indexes a
powerful animal or because it endures rather than because it
represents death and violence.
R. Girard’s64
has provided a useful framework for interpreting
the violent imagery at Çatalhöyük. For him religion
is a way of managing and evacuating the violence generated
inside the human community. Most archaic religions show a
narrative that involves going through violence to resolution. At
Çatalhöyük there is often a pairing, two cranes, two skulls or
two confronting leopards in deadlock. The other key symbol is
the reverse of this — a group of people surrounding an exaggerated
animal. The bull is about to be killed and taken into
the house. The people will kill and be reconciled. This is not a
matter of worshipping violence, but of peace produced through
61. HODDER and MESKELL, 2011.
62. SHULTS, 2010.
63. HODDER, 2006.
64. GIRARD, 1988.
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violence. There is a destructuring in the deadlock and a resolution
into a new structure if the bull is treated right.
Bloch65
has noted that violence would have been a central
theme in Çatalhöyük. His approach is more sociological66
and
based on his general assessment that Çatalhöyük was some
form of ‘house society’67
in which rights and resources were
passed down in ‘houses’ (groups of houses led together by the
passing down of rights). He argued that in such contexts there
would have been the violence of wrenching women from their
birth ‘house’ and forcing them to live in a marital ‘house’. More
generally it seems likely that there would have been much conflict
over resources in the dense town. And yet there is much
evidence from the human remains at the site that the people at
Çatalhöyük had lived non-violent lives. There were few indications
of the cuts, wounds, parry fractures, or crushed skulls.
So how had the potential to violence been so well managed at
Çatalhöyük? Bloch68
has argued that symbolic violence was
a necessary part of the movement into another world. Most
human societies understand that there is a permanent framework
to social life that transcends the natural transformative
processes of birth, growth, reproduction, ageing and death.
The violence and symbolic killing take people beyond process
into permanent entities such as descent groups. By leaving this
life, it is possible to see oneself and others as part of something
permanent and life-transcending. For Bloch,69
mastering
the virility of wild bulls in rituals and depictions in the house
‘reanimated’ the transcendental social and thus contributed to
the continuity of the house.
The moments of danger and/or violence involved movements
away from the here-and-now; they involved transcendent
experiences in which the social group could be transformed
and made permanent. So it seems that there could indeed be
a link between the violence in the imagery at Çatalhöyük and
the lack of violence on human bodies. (There may have been
regional variation in the Middle East Neolithic, with perhaps
more evidence of bodily violence at Çayönü.) At Çatalhöyük,
social violence was dealt with by living within a symbolic,
transcendent world of violence in which conflicts were resolved
and social structures made permanent.
The view that the violent imagery at Çatalhöyük and other
sites had a key role in creating the social and the long-term as
people first settled down and formed complex societies is summarized
in Fig. 2. In this diagram, on the central horizontal
65. BLOCH, 2010.
66. See BLOCH, 2008.
67. JOYCE and GILLSEPIE, 2000.
68. BLOCH, 2008.
69. BLOCH, 1992.
axis, the person is made social through violence and death,
either through initiation and other rituals or in the daily interactions
with bull horns and other animal parts present or made
absent in the house. In the lower part of the diagram, this social
process is linked to the transcendental and the spiritual as persons
experience something beyond themselves that is integral
to their lives. Spiritual power is gained by individuals in these
experiences, but also is controlled by elders. In the upper part
of the diagram these spiritual powers are related to social powers.
The social manipulation of rituals and symbols of violence
give power to elders and dominant houses. There is also evidence
that the power of wild animals was used to provide or
protect. Thus in fig. 1 the bull horns surround and protect the
ancestors buried beneath the platform and in one case wild
goat horns were found over, perhaps protecting, a bin containing
lentils (Building 1).70
This is a very different conception of the symbolism and
ritual associated with the origins of agriculture and settled villages
from that normally outlined.71
It has become commonplace
to argue that the early farmers would have emphasized
ideas of fertility, nurturing and abundance.72
The earliest settled
settlements are often associated with images of women,
sometimes interpreted as pregnant or fertile and much attention
is paid to the few female figurines that have been found.
But in fact male and phallic imagery is common, linked to
images of wild male animals at Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük.
Social rules and roles seem to have been established in these
first communities largely through a conception of the world in
which violence and dangerous wild animals played a central
part, as outlined in fig. 2.
Keane73
has discussed violence and death based on a Sumbanese
example. He argues that there is a bundle of many different
things that killing large dangerous animals does. The
process is not unitary, and violence might not be the most
important aspect. One aspect that he stresses because it is consistent
with other things going on at Çatalhöyük is that killing
big animals is a dramatic display of the control over the transition
from life to death, visible to invisible, presence to absence.
Thus, once again, social power is created through violence and
death.
Turning to the social role of death, it is clear that this
played an important part in the building of house-based social
groups at Çatalhöyük. It is clear that while all houses were
70. HODDER, 2006.
71. E.g., CAUVIN, 2000; MELLAART, 1967.
72. HODDER and MESKELL, 2011.
73. KEANE, 2010.
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Fig. 2 – An interpretation of the role of violence in the social
and religious process at Çatalhöyük.
very similar in size and elaboration at the site, some houses
were larger, more elaborate, and lasted longer than others.
These more elaborate houses often contained more burials than
other houses and indeed seem to have been used as repositories
of the dead from other houses. Thus some physical sun-dried
mud-brick houses became ‘houses’ of people held together by
the circulation of human remains. Because these ‘houses’ also
seem to have amassed animal parts, to be curated and passed
down as memorials of feasts and animal kills, and because they
also contained other symbolic elaboration such as reliefs and
paintings, these houses have been termed ‘history houses’.74
This focus on history houses, and on the wider category
of house societies to which they belong, might seem like an
unnecessary tangent in a discussion about religion. But in fact
this would be a misunderstanding of the role of the house at
Çatalhöyük. In house based societies, houses are ‘religion’.
As we have seen above, the play of presence and absence that
is the religious process at Çatalhöyük takes place in the floor
platforms, ridges, accoutrements, burials of the house. In particular,
the heads of wild animals and humans are passed down
from generation to generation within individual houses and
between houses. Following Bloch, we can say that the virility
of wild bulls installed in the material house reanimated the
social house. The passing down of the objects of the house and
the remembering and reliving of earlier houses constituted the
social through the religious.
A quantitative analysis of the houses at Çatalhöyük has
attempted to explore the differences between history houses
74. HODDER and PELS, 2010.
and other houses.75
Little difference could be found between
these two house types in terms of access to resources. So how
was it possible for some houses to gain social and spiritual
power through the amassing of skulls and wild bull horns and
human burials while others did not? Keane76
has suggested
that bull horns accumulated over a career. The marks in a
house (horns, paintings, etc.) were historical, they were traces
of events. Some houses never got marks or burials, and they
might be categorically different from those that did (maybe
branch or cadet lines, for example). But the differences among
houses with marks may have been historical in nature, not categorical.
Over generations, some houses acquired more events
than others. Houses with 60 burials probably were categorically
different from those with none. But houses with many
bucrania or paintings were also houses that had persisted long
enough to acquire more marks. As archaeologists we catch
them at a late stage in the career of accumulating marks. The
quantity of marks is in part a function of time. This explanation
begs the question of why some houses persisted longer
than others. Perhaps many contingent factors were involved.
But it remains possible that the more persistent and long-lasting
houses were those that most effectively manipulated marks
and absences; those that came to be recognized as good at protecting
the dead were also most able at reanimate the traces of
kills and feasts.
CONCLUSION
It is clear that, to a large extent, recent research at Çatalhöyük,
both comparative and empirical, has largely confirmed
the value of responding to the ideas in Cauvin’s seminal 2000
book. It may not have been helpful to separate the mental, the
symbolic, the religious from daily life and certainly a separate
religious institutional sphere cannot be identified at Çatalhöyük.
Such separations are produced in our own time but not
in the time of the Neolithic. The recent finds from Göbekli
Tepe and other sites have demonstrated that female symbolism
was only part of a wider suite of symbols in which males
and violence played equally important roles. It seems evident
that symbolic and religious components of life were central to
the domestication of plants and animals and that they played
an early and formative role, even if they were not originators.
It also seems clear that changes in the conceptualization of
75. Ibid.
76. KEANE, 2010.
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humans in relation to animals were an early and necessary part
of the gradual process of domesticating animals in the Middle
East.
The evidence thus seems to support the rather more nuanced
version of the Neolithisation process found in parts of Cauvin’s
book and described in the introduction to this article. Rather
than religion or new forms of agency being prime causes in
the domestication of plants and animals and the emergence
of settled villages, religion and the symbolic were thoroughly
engrained within the interstices of the new way of life. Religion
played a primary role, allowing new forms of agency,
setting up a symbolic world of violence through which new
longer-term social and economic relations could be produced,
but there is not good evidence that it was an independent cause
of the changes.
Perhaps more important than the specific claims of Cauvin
and the particular responses to them, his work has attracted
very wide discussion across a swathe of disciplines. As a result,
the debate about the role of religion in the Neolithic has been
transformed and brought into closer dialogue with anthropology,
philosophy and religious studies. The result is richer and more
complex and it is to Cauvin that we should offer thanks; he who
set us on this broader and more productive path, thinking new
thoughts and encountering new ideas and data on the way.
Ian HODDER
Department of Anthropology
Stanford University
Main Quad, Building 50 – 450 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-2034 – USA
ihodder@stanford.edu
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