Incredible discovery of intact female figurine from neolithic era in Turkey
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Annalee Newitz
Nine thousand years ago in Turkey, a
large settlement called Çatalhöyük thrived for more than a millennium.
Full of densely packed mud brick houses covered in paintings and
symbolic decorations, its population hovered around 5,000. That made it
one of the biggest settlements of its era, somewhere between an outsized
village and tiny city. Now, archaeologists excavating there have
discovered a rare, intact statuette of a woman buried carefully with a
valuable piece of obsidian.
Figurines resembling this one, with large
breasts, belly, and buttocks, have been found throughout the Anatolian
region. But this is one of the only intact examples ever found. At
nearly seven inches long, it's also one of the largest. Made of marble,
it lay buried beneath the floor of a neolithic home for 8,000 years
before its excavation this past summer.
News of the discovery first broke in The Daily Sabah and spread quickly through Turkish media. Few details were available, but Ars
has confirmed the find with Stanford archaeologist Ian Hodder, who has
led excavations at Çatalhöyük since the 1990s. He offered a complete
description of the figurine, as well as thoughts about its context in
both the ancient city and the Anatolian region in the 6th millennium
BCE.
Not a goddess
In the mid-twentieth century, archaeologists
like James Mellaart believed female figurines like this one represented
fertility goddesses. This idea became popular in New Age culture, whose
adherents celebrated the idea that ancient peoples were woman-centric
and shared a cult of goddess worship. But over the past twenty years,
evidence from Çatalhöyük and contemporaneous sites have undermined this
interpretation.
As Stanford archaeologist Lynn Meskell has pointed out in a number of papers
about figurines found at Çatalhöyük, little material evidence suggests
that these curvaceous statuettes were the objects of worship. Nearly all
such figurines have been found in garbage piles, as if they were built
for a specific purpose—whether spiritual or playful—and then thrown
away. They are also rarely built with bases, so they could never have
been erected for display. Instead, they might have been passed from
hand-to-hand, or perhaps worn as ornaments.
By contrast, statues and representations of
animals at Çatalhöyük are clearly given specialized treatment. Bull
horns are mounted on walls and next to doors, while some animal bones
are embedded inside the plaster walls. Paintings of leopards, bulls, and
other animals are given what appears to be special symbolic
significance in homes. If any figurines would be candidates for worship,
it would likely be these animal representations rather than the plump
women.
Meskell and her colleagues suggest instead
that these female figures are likely representations of village elders,
respected older women who had a lot of power in the community. She
points out that their bodies are not youthful, and their bellies and
breasts do not exhibit the roundness of pregnancy or fertility. Instead,
their bellies and breasts sag. These are older women, their size
possibly intended to convey the accumulation of wisdom—or continued
prosperity. Hodder told Ars that the new figurine supports Meskell's interpretation, as it also appears to be an older woman "who has achieved status."
A “ritual context”
What makes this figurine different is that it
was not found in a garbage pile, but instead it was carefully buried in a
spot that would have been deeply significant to residents of
Çatalhöyük. A common practice among these city dwellers was burying
their dead under their floors, usually under raised platforms that
served as beds. Often they would dig up the skulls of the dead later,
plaster their faces (perhaps to recreate the faces of loved ones), and
give them to other houses. Archaeologists frequently find skeletons from
several people intermingled in these graves, with skulls from other
people added. Wear and tear on some plastered skulls suggest they were
traded back and forth, sometimes for generations, before being reburied.
According to Hodder, such special skulls are just as often female as
they are male.
The new figurine was found buried in exactly
the same place that the beloved or honored dead were buried—under a
platform on the floor of a house. The house itself had been rebuilt
three times over the centuries, in what seems to be the custom at
Çatalhöyük. Older homes were knocked down to their foundations, and new
dwellings were built on top with the same dimensions. Often the
rebuilding involved digging up old skulls and skeletons, then reburying
them with great care. The figurine appears to have been buried during
one of these times. She was placed during the laying of a foundation for
the third house. The builders dug a hole into the old foundation,
gently covered the figurine with two layers of clean sand and clay, and
then built a whitewashed plaster platform on top.
Hodder told Ars that the figurine's placement and design make it very rare:
It was not found in refuse but had
been carefully placed beneath a platform, together with a piece of
obsidian. This is undoubtedly some form of ritual deposition. The
context shows that this figurine differed from others in its
completeness and careful deposition, as well as in its very fine
craftsmanship... The hands are folded under the breasts, which are
splayed to the side, as if the figure was depicted lying down. Other
features depicted include the eyes, mouth, chin, neck fat, the back of
the head roll, all incised. The navel is incised as an asymmetrical
triangle pointing up and is more roughly done than the other lines which
are very deliberately incised and naturalistic. The hands and feet are
disproportionately small compared to the rest of the body. The figurine
was first shaped by polishing, and then all the body details were
incised. The execution of all details shows great attention to detail
and great level of skill.
Given what we know of how the people of
Çatalhöyük treated their female figurines and their dead, this
particular figurine appears to have been given the same treatment you'd
expect from a plastered skull. Again, this does not suggest we've found a
fertility goddess. Instead, it seems more likely than ever that
Meskell's idea is right—these figurines represented honored elders.
Perhaps this was even a statuette of a specific woman whose skull or
skeleton was lost. What Hodder calls the "naturalistic" details of the
design support this interpretation.
Without a time machine we can't say for sure
what this statuette meant to the people who buried her. But we do know
that she was treated like a revered dead person rather than a
supernatural object of worship. That means we haven't discovered a
goddess-worshipping society at Çatalhöyük, but instead a group of people
who honored female elders in art, as well as in their everyday
practices.
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