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28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting account and a wonderful illustration of modern archaeology, April 17, 2007
This review is from: The Leopard's Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Catalhoyuk (Hardcover)
I bought the Leopard's Tale because I had read another book, Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos, and the Realm of the Gods, which mentioned that new excavations had recently been conducted on Mellart's old site, Çatalhöyük. Discovered in the 1950's and assessed the oldest agricultural settlement, it wasn't excavated until the early `60's and the popular account of the site was interesting and exciting to read. The Leopard's Tale reveals, more than anything else, how much the discipline of archaeology has progressed over the last several decades. Much more is made of the details sieved from the debris from the site than had been the case on this or any other site. Archaeology has incorporated a multidisciplinary approach to its assessment of ancient sites that provides a glimpse of the realities of life during the period of deposition. Climate, paleosols, topography and relationship with other sites are just a few of the new features presented. The author, Ian Hodder, writes a very readable book for the lay person about the recent work on the Turkish site. He mentions data taken from paleontology, zooarchaology, palenology, geology and other sources that fill in for the reader a vision of life at the time Çatalhöyük was a living residential site. Many of Mellart's original interpretations of artifactual and architectural remains have been given an update that takes into account the information from the scientific approaches to the site presently being conducted. The odd title of the book arises from the fact that leopards coexisted in Turkey during the site's occupation, and they feature prominently in the visual record from the site in the forms of paintings of the animal, relief sculpture of it, and in possible depictions of people wearing the animal's skin or material designed to look like its signature rosettes. Using this as a starting point, Hodder attempts to discern the mental outlook of the inhabitants in respect to their enculturalization, their religious frame of reference, their approach to group living, their choice of architecture, and so on, working around this main theme. Using ethnographic evidence drawn for cultural studies among modern groups who display similar material and spatial characteristics, he attempts to interpret the context in which the individual spent his or her life at Çatalhöyük and the effect that this milieu had on the individual's personal frame of reference. I've taken an interest in mind/brain studies and in the plasticity of the nervous system recently and I'm inclined to agree with the author that the environment and personal experience definitely shape the brain and what can be assumed "possible." One of the more recent books I've read on the topic is ." The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (James H. Silberman Books), and the information I gleaned from this title certainly bears weight on Dr. Hodder's interpretation of the mental furniture of the people living at the time. I have no doubt that they thought entirely differently about their environment than we do. Technology, information about the environment, scientific knowledge and so on have all accumulated over the centuries to shape and reshape our experiences and outlooks. So fast does the modern world change, that there can be a major difference in how people think about various topics and about what's possible even between one generation and the next. These are actual brain changes, not just cultural or attitudinal changes. Still, I'm not entirely certain that anything can really be said about the actual attitudes of the ancient population with respect to their material culture. Certainly the presence of the art objects portraying the leopard indicate that the animal apparently loomed large in the imagination of the individuals who created the work. The fact that the reliefs were sometimes removed and repositioned when a house was rebuilt suggests this is so. The author, however, builds his archaeological narrative around the animal---or rather its physical absence from the site. Although I find his interpretation of the artifactual evidence or its absence intriguing, I would caution the casual reader against the assumption that this is in fact how the occupants of the site experienced either the animal or the proposed behaviors surrounding it and other characteristics of the site. As he notes, they thought and felt differently about their world. Given that we have great difficulty in even understanding how modern social groups who are different from us culturally view the world and the meaning of the objects and behaviors exhibited in it, I can't imagine that putting several thousand years between us and that social group will improve the situation to any degree. I would therefore suggest that the reader evaluate the interpretive portions of the book with that in mind. They are guesses based on hard data by a professional, but they're still just guesses.
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37 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exciting and Enlighting Story of Humankind at the Dawn of Agriculture, August 6, 2006
This review is from: The Leopard's Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Catalhoyuk (Hardcover)
At last a comprehensive, readable account of the most recent archaeological work at Catalhoyuk. Ian Hodder gives us many beautiful pictures of artifacts as well as diagrams and charts that build a picture of what was found. Trying to avoid making assumptions based on our modern worldview, he carefully makes deductions from the data and builds up a picture of the inhabitants and what it must have been like to live there. As much as the "Goddess Community" would like to stay with earlier assumptions, the data does not support a female centered society or religion at the site. Instead a much more balanced and egalitarian life and spirituality seems to be attested to. The earlier images of powerful and dangerous wild animals that once were painted on cave walls are echoed and elaborated on the walls of the close-packed mud brick houses of Catalhoyuk. Their walls celebrated the power of the wild bull and boar even as their sustenance increasingly depended on domesticated sheep and goats and cultivated agricultural products. There have been no large public buildings or palaces found. The center of life and production appears to have been the individual home. The focus seems to have been the family and it's ancestors, many of whom are buried beneath platforms in the houses. Elders probably made decisions for the community. Houses were built atop their predecessors so that the site seems like a large layer cake. Families cooperated in caring for fields and flocks and for supplying wild animals for feasting. They had excellent sources of mud for bricks and plaster for their walls nearby and obtained obsidian for tools from sources 100 miles away. We are used to viewing the history of "Civilization" as based on the gaining of power by some and the subjugation of others. The "winners" celebrate their prowess in monuments built by the rest. This work shows that it wasn't always that way. The settlement at Catalhoyuk seems to connect to later Minoan Civilization as it is coming to light in excavations in Santorini. (See Unearthing Atlantis by Charles Pellegrino.) I recommend this book to anyone even remotely interested in the history and possibilities of humankind.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Challenging the paradigm, May 28, 2009
This review is from: The Leopard's Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Catalhoyuk (Hardcover)
Catalhoyuk is an archaeological site in Anatolia in Turkey, where the remains of a "town" densely occupied from the Neolithic age (about 7500 BCE) though the Chalcolithic (early use of Copper, about 6000 BCE) have been excavated. What is remarkable about this site is the symbolic art that has been found there: Skulls of wild bulls and parts of other wild animals are plastered on to the walls of the houses, which are also decorated with many paintings of wild animal hunts; the human participants of these scenes often wear what look like leopard skins, and illustrations of leopards - usually in pairs - abound throughout the site. The book - written by the Director of Research at Catalhoyuk - is subtitled, perhaps ironically, "The Leopard's Tale", as hardly a trace of a leopard was found among the faunal remains at the site through many seasons of excavation. This contrast is one of many; the domestic animal remains found at the site were mainly sheep and goats, but no parts of these animals were ever plastered to the walls, nor do they find their way into the wall painting. Activities within the house were evidently carefully regulated and differentiated: People were buried under the floors of the houses; these burials were almost invariably close to the north and east walls of the house. Domestic activities - food preparation and cooking - were always carried out in the south part of the house, where the walls were undecorated. The floor areas within the house clearly demarcated these different areas - often with slightly different levels or raised edges, and with the use of different types and colors of flooring material. The author uses these and other recurrent patterns in the material remains at Catalhoyuk to develop a picture of the worldview of these ancient inhabitants - their social and economic life, the roles of men and women, and their spiritual concepts. This process - extrapolating from the material culture of prehistoric sites to the sociology, psychology and religion of the inhabitants - is known as Cognitive Archaeology. It is of course far more speculative than when dealing with more recent cultures, where written sources are available to supplement and provide context for the archaeological finds. However, as more and more prehistoric sites - from different parts of the world - are examined in this way, certain broad common themes are starting to emerge, enabling the field of cognitive archaeology to develop principles and disciplines of interpretation. A theme that the author returns to throughout the book is that of the relationship between the activities motivated by symbolic/ritualistic needs - like using a particular type of lime to plaster a floor of the house after a burial - and the social or domestic activities needed to support them - for example, cooperative arrangements with other households to locate the limestone and burn it. He calls this process "entanglement", and describes how one type of entanglement would catalyse another in a progressively more complex set of interactions between material, social and symbolic needs. Thus for example, the need to obtain the cooperation of others required some kind of reciprocal framework for regulating social relationships; this framework might be based on hunting symbolically important animals (like wild bulls) and sharing them in a feast. The bull skulls plastered to the walls of the house might well be the way of creating a historical record of the hunts and feasts, and determining the rank or prestige of the person or the family ancestor involved. (That both bull's skulls and human skulls were often dug up from a lower, i.e. earlier, level of occupation and relocated in the current house is evidence of their importance in family histories). In the final chapter, the author broadens the scope beyond the specifics of Catalhoyuk, and speculates how many of the progressive stages of early human civilization might have been driven by processes of entanglement - on a much broader scale and longer time horizon. Conventionally, it is presumed that the domestication of wild crops and animals in the early Neolithic caused people to settle down and live in one place in order to enjoy the benefits of domestication. Hodder believes that the domestication of crops was more likely to have been the inadvertent consequence of nomadic groups getting together for joint ritual and symbolic activities. (They harvested wild grasses as materials for making baskets, mats, shelters etc; this selected for varieties of grain which tended to keep their seed heads during harvesting, grains which do not automatically propagate in the wild). Hodder points to sites from a much earlier than the Neolithic - like Ohalo II south of the Sea of Galilee in Israel, which was occupied in the Paleolithic 20,000 years ago - which show clear signs of repeated if not continuous occupation, as evidence of the fact that early humans gathered together in fixed locations for reasons other than settling down to an agricultural lifestyle. Even if you don't go all the way with Hodder, the journey itself is very worthwhile. The descriptions and illustrations of the excavations at Catalhoyuk are superb, and the range of different disciplines and techniques involved - archaeobotanical analysis, radio carbon dating, micromorphological analysis of soils, isotopic analysis of bone, to name but a few - leave one in no doubt that every deduction about the lifestyles and culture of the inhabitants is based only on the most thorough and minute analysis of the material remains.
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