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The Leopard's Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Catalhoyuk

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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.

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.

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.

The book concentrates on the social aspect of the people living in Catalhoyuk. Their living quarters, their food, agriculture, animal husbandry, artwork on the walls, pots, where they burried their dead, how they built one house upon the other, etc. It brings you a community alive and fascinating.

This is a beautiful book, not because it paints a lovingly detailed picture of how archeology is carried out in these days - although it does this - and not because it contains many clear and intriguing images, both photographic and written, of this marvelous ancient site. It is beautiful because the author, in his straightforward, undramatic and essentially compassionate approach to the material and people, both ancient and modern, presented here, reveals something astonishing to the world. To summarize in such a small space does little justice to his argument, but what he says, essentially, is that Catalhoyuk arose as a direct result of increasing entanglement (his word) between people, and between people and things, that started long before the Neolithic and, as any reader with the capacity for reflection will acknowledge, continues to this day. Furthermore, he states that these entanglements play themselves out and, really, are embodied in the details of our everyday activity. When, in the course of reading this book, I finally got the full sweep and power of what he was saying I literally developed the shivers and had to stop reading for a while. Mr. Hodder opens a window in which we see the accretion and crystallization of what we now recognize as "the human condition" at a crucial stage of its development. Looking through that window is a dizzying experience but one I heartily recommend.

Catalhöyük is an archaeological site in central Turkey, excavated by James Mellaart during the 1960's and again by Ian Hodder during the 1990's. Hodder is the author of the book "Catalhöyük. The Leopard's Tale", published in 2006.

For practical reasons, the name Catalhöyük has also been given to the ancient town that existed on the site from 7400 BC to 6000 BC, i.e. during the Neolithic. The town had between 3000 and 8000 inhabitants, and was continuously inhabited for 1400 years. It's sometimes called "the oldest town in history".

Ancient Catalhöyük is a mysterious civilization, difficult for us to fathom. For starters, the town was never destroyed for 1400 years, and there are no indications that the inhabitants waged wars. For some reason, Hodder never emphasizes this point, yet the idea of a peaceful culture that lasted for 1400 years is surely mysterious in itself. At least for those who believe that war is an "adaptive trait" or "human universal".

The Neolithic town had no streets, and access to the various houses was from the roof level. Between the houses were animal pens or places for waste disposal. The houses themselves turned out to be quite sensational when Mellaart first started his excavations. The houses are filled with painted artwork, animal remains and human graves! Naturally, Mellaart assumed they were shrines. Today, we know that they actually were real houses: people lived in one end of the house, while the other end served religious and ritual purposes. Dead family members were literally buried below the floor. The religious symbolism is centered on wild animals, with leopards and wild bulls being most prominent. This is curious for a culture based on agriculture and sheep farming. There also seems to be an obsession with death, sex and violence. Paintings of vultures decapitating dead humans are prominently featured on the house walls, and so are hunting scenes. This also raises all kinds of questions, since the people of Catalhöyük never waged any wars. Another strange ritual involved exhuming and plastering human skulls of dead relatives.

Another striking feature of ancient Catalhöyük was the egalitarianism. Somehow, Hodder cannot accept this, and he spends a large part of his book attempting to find some kind of hierarchies and social dominance patterns within the Neolithic town. He is not very successful. Some of the houses were more important than others, since they had more elaborate artworks and attracted more burials, but these houses might simply have been the main buildings of kinship groups. Why else would more people choose to be buried in them? The standard of living was roughly equal across the board, and for most of Catalhöyük's existence, there are no differences between male and female burials. Hodder believes that hunting of wild bulls followed by communal feasting was an important part of social life in the town, and that the groups who gave the largest feasts got more prestige. Perhaps, but the feasts were collective, and there doesn't seem to be any accumulation of wealth involved. It seems the inhabitants got prestige by feeding their neighbours!

Hodder further speculates that the revealing of hidden artwork and animal skulls inside the houses were important ritual events, by which some families or kinship groups could outshine the others, thereby gaining dominance. Finally, he proposes that shamans had more power due to their contact with the supernatural realm. I don't rule this out, but it's important to realize that such a situation is itself highly anomalous: why wasn't the spiritual power and ritual prestige of the shamans translated into tangible material benefits? Surely, it wasn't impossible for a local elite group to accumulate wealth of its own? Incidentally, the same problem confronts us when discussing another mysterious ancient culture, the Indus Valley Civilization, which looks egalitarian despite being a high culture with an advanced division of labour. Some have proposed that the Indus people were ruled by a caste of ascetic priests. Perhaps, but how can a ruling caste stay ascetic for centuries? Clearly, we are missing some piece of the puzzle somewhere. Perhaps we simply have a too cynical, materialist mindset. Or perhaps we simply can't believe that ancient cultures might have been peaceful and egalitarian to begin with.

One chapter of Hodder's book deals with the various groups of outsiders who have taken up an interest in the excavations. These include local Turkish politicians who are often nationalist or Muslim conservatives, European Union officials who use Catalhöyük as an argument for Turkish-European cooperation, Turkish and American artists, and the Goddess community for whom the ancient site proves the existence of matriarchy. It seems Hodder and his team have a difficult time balancing all these special interests! The Goddess community might get disappointed by Hodder's book, since Hodder doesn't believe Catalhöyük was matriarchal. Rather, he speculates that it was both matrilinear and patrilinear, and that a large part of their religion was centered on male prowess in hunting, and even male sexuality. However, males and females do seem roughly equal, judging by burial remains. Hodder downplays the famous image of a woman seated between two leopards, despite the fact that similar images from later periods depict goddesses. For instance, the goddess Cybele was associated with lions.

Be that as it may, I nevertheless recommend this book for those wishing to learn more about this mysterious culture of a distant past. And yes, this review is another veiled attack on androcentric sociobiology!

I bought this book because I wanted to know about the famous archaeological dig at Catalhoyuk in Turkey, and my money was well spent. This is an excellent overview of the recent excavations on this giant Pre-Pottery Neolithic site which involves centuries of settlement, before the invention of writing. Ian Hodder's writing is eloquent, readable and restrained. He does not indulge in rampant theorizing about what these ancient people thought, felt or did. He presents the evidence with great specificity and discusses intelligently what we can infer from what is discovered. Hodder draws on other important books for insight, including studies of "modern" primitive tribes whose behavior might provide ways of assessing the materials found at Catalhoyuk. He presents all these related materials in rich context, and the documentation is excellent. ---- The book is rich is fascinating details. This is a world in which people buried their dead under the floors of the rooms in which they lived, and sometimes retrieved the skulls of the dead in order to decorate them with plaster and keep them for reasons that we may never fully comprehend. That floors and walls were polished, that people cooked with clay balls (which they heated in the fire and then put into liquids to warm them, or on which they laid out meat to cook it), that rooms were ornamented with bulls' heads, that entry was often through the roof, that wall paintings involve hunt scenes, and a special attention to leopards, that there are numerous deliberately decapitated figurines found in storage bins, or in flooring --- all of this and more makes very interesting reading. Of course there is discussion of the Mother Goddess, and the goddess figurines discovered at Catalhoyuk which have caused so much interest. ---- The many black and white photographs, drawings, and color plates do wonders. I'm finding out here just what I want to know. ----- Of course there are many other similar sites in the Near East; plastered skulls have been found at Jericho and in other ruins; but studying this one site in such depth one can gain a greater understanding of what has been reported from so many other places. ---- Supplementing this with Nicholas Wade's beautifully written Behind the Dawn provides a wonderful context for approaching the period. --- It's sad to me that this book is apparently out of print. I hope it is re-printed, and goes into paperback for a wider readership. It's an extremely fine work of scholarship. A very worthwhile addition to the library of any archaeology enthusiast. Highly recommended.

I really enjoyed this book. Yes, it is dry and academic, but thats a plus in my opinion. I believe the author was very controlled and fair minded in his appraisal of Catalhoyuk. This becomes very apparent when agendas from a few social-political groups, good intentioned or not, have less than delicately attempted to co-opt Catalhoyuk. The author's patience is apparent, as well as his tact. It is really difficult to read any agenda he may have in this book. Again, I say good, because I won't be making any leaps into wishful thinking.

Did you ever wonder what your 376th grandparents lived like? How their society might have been structured? What were the gender roles? Did they view themsleves as individuals? What was their sense of self? Of family? Did they appreciate art? What purpose might art have served in their lives and in the life of their community? What did they eat and wear?

Hodder has written a remarkable book and it's accessible to all, not just the trained archaeologist. He also is not afraid to specutlate, although he always roots his ruminations in the facts. I find myself nodding in appreciation most of the time.

I wish every site had an excavator and explicator as talented and thorough as Hodding.

An excellent book: not to be missed if you love history, archaeology, anthropology, or just plain good writing.