Social memory through the mortuary and architectural use of pigments at Neolithic Çatalhöyük (7100 cal BC to 5950 cal BC)

Pigments are frequently associated with symbolic use and ritual performance, contributing to the creation of social memories in past and present societies. The Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük, central Anatolia, Turkey, features a roughly millennium-long occupation - from 7100 cal BC to 5950 cal BC - with an unusually large dataset of elaborate symbolic assemblages and subfloor burials, often associated with pigments. These elements make Çatalhöyük a good candidate for the study of diachron..

Chapter 16.: The colour of things. Pigments and colours in Neolithic Çatalhöyük

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A Glimpse through Time and Space: Visualizing Spatial Continuity and History Making at Çatalhöyük, Turkey

The inhabitants of Çatalhöyük, a 13.5-hectare Neolithic site (ca. 7100–5900 BCE) located in central Anatolia, Turkey created material links between themselves and their past by repetitively constructing and maintaining mudbrick houses and actively retrieving skeletal remains from buried buildings. We argue that archaeological visualization is a viable tool to aid interpretation of this habituated behavior and commemorative links to the past, also known as “history making.” This study employed widely adopted methods to ensure reliability, scientific rigor, and tracking of knowledge provenance in the implementation of multi-temporal 3D reconstructions of the Shrine 10 sequence, a series of superimposed buildings spanning a significant part of the site’s chronology. Our results facilitate analysis of the history-making practices documented in the Shrine 10 sequence by providing unambiguous visual representations of its complex archaeological record and enabling users to visualize the long-term history of this Neolithic built spac

Data from: A Glimpse through Time and Space: Visualizing Social Memory and History-making at Çatalhöyük

This collection includes a set of 3-D models, derived 3-D renders and archaeological visualizations, and related metadata that reconstruct both spatially and temporally (4-D) the ‘Shrine’ 10 sequence at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, Turkey. These series of four superimposed buildings – or five, depending on whether ‘Shrines’ VI.A.10 and VI.B.10 are considered two separate buildings or two phases of the same one. It was uncovered at Çatalhöyük between Mellaart’s excavation in the 1960s and more recent archaeological work conducted in the framework of the Çatalhöyük Research Project, under the direction of Ian Hodder. With its multiple rebuilds, the sequence covers a significant part of the entire site’s sequence, spanning from the later part of its early period (c. 7100-6700 BC) to its entire middle period (c. 6700-6500 BC), with an estimated time range of about 300 years. Houses that are rebuilt multiple times also tend to be more elaborated (both architecturally and symbolically) and to contain multiple burials. In particular, the link between burials and multiple rebuilds is crucial, as it signals the extended time depth of a household both through ancestral connection – i.e. the physical presence of human remains buried below the house’s floors – and by the physical endurance of the house itself. For this reason, buildings that comprise multiple rebuilds, architectural and symbolic elaboration, and multiple burials have been termed ‘history houses’ by Hodder and Pels (2010), and are interpreted as houses that achieved an important social and symbolic status within the wider community, although this socio-symbolic importance does not seem to correlate with greater wealth or preferential access to resources. The archaeological research necessary to create the 3-D models featured this collection was researched by Gesualdo Busacca and Nicola Lercari. The 3-D models were created by Grant Cox (ArtasMedia). They are in .fbx and .x3d file formats to guarantee interoperability between different digital content creation and 3D visualization platforms. The models were created in Autodesk 3D Studio Max using standard polygonal modeling. They include “baked” textures to be easily imported in Unity 3D or Unreal game development ecosystems and enable virtual reality exploration. Grant Cox also created the 3-D renders in V-Ray for 3DS Max. The archaeological visualizations were created by Arianna Campiani, Jad Aboulhosn, and Nicola Lercari

Pigment Use at Neolithic Çatalhöyük

The Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük offers an exceptional dataset for studying pigment usage over one-thousand years of the existence of the settlement. The inhabitants produced a rich palette of colors, with pigments applied to objects, in architectural paintings, and for treatment of the dead. This article discusses evidence of pigments at Neolithic Çatalhöyük based on data collected during the twenty-five years of research under the directorship of Ian Hodder (1993–2017)

Pigment use in Neolithic Çatalhöyük

From the Middle Paleolithic onwards, pigments have been used variably in different social and ritual activities as well as in the expression of symbolism through material culture (e.g., Brooks et al. 2018; D’Errico 2008). In the Levant and Anatolia, symbolic practices with pigments became increasingly common in the epipaleolithic and pre-pottery Neolithic periods (e.g., Bocquentin and Garrard 2016; Goring-Morris, Hovers, and Belfer-Cohen 2009; Richter et al. 2019; Baird 2012; Baird et al. 2013)