Mixed Harvest by Rob Swigart

Author:Rob Swigart [Swigart, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Archaeology, History, General, Fiction, Historical
ISBN: 9781789206128
Google: fl6vDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2019-12-03T05:22:47+00:00

Thus began Çatalhöyük, an important World Heritage settlement on Turkey’s Konya plain. The small percentage uncovered by archaeologists so far has revealed details of its long occupation.

Many still lived by foraging and hunting. Nomads still tended docile sheep and goats, leading them back and forth from summer to winter pasturage, sometimes over great distances, but most humans were no longer following the food, as in the Paleolithic; the food was staying close to home.

Those who settled permanently kept their animals close. They devoted more and more time to cultivating grains and other crops. They shaped objects out of clay like bricks and figurines and small balls they could use to heat water for stews and soups.

The settlement’s basic pattern—sun-dried mud brick walls, roof entrances, hearths, storage bins, and sleeping platforms would repeat for hundreds of years across thousands of houses.

The new factor was density. The dwellings pressed against one another, with no space between them except accidental gaps where houses failed to connect. In effect, they became underground caves. The dead buried under the floors were the underground of the underground. Although house burials had been practiced for a long time, crowding pressed everyone into greater intimacy with death.

Çatalhöyük is still not a town. There are few if any public buildings or public spaces, no marked differences in the buildings. Most people probably spent time away in the warm season tending their animals or plots of cultivated land.

When they were in residence those double thick walls were a second skin around the bodies of those within, but protective walls can also isolate.

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