This is the third volume of papers that derive from an extended programme (The Primary Role of Religion in the Origin of Settled Life: the Evidence from Çatalhöyük and the Middle East, funded by the John Templeton Foundation) that has run alongside the last decade or so of Ian Hodder's research at Çatalhöyük, the massive, long-lived Neolithic settlement in central Anatolia. The first volume in the series (Hodder Reference Hodder2010) slipped under Antiquity’s radar; the second (Hodder Reference Hodder2014) was reviewed by Yorke Rowan (Reference Rowan2016), together with another book on the archaeology of religion.
Each of the three stages in the exercise involved bringing a select multi-disciplinary group of scholars to Çatalhöyük for a week or two over a period of three field seasons to encounter the site and the excavations, to meet and talk with the team working on the site and in the labs, and to take part in an intensive programme of seminars and mini-conferences. We are told that several of the chapters for this volume derive from papers that were presented at the final meeting at Çatalhöyük in August 2014. The broad question that all were asked to address was “whether there was widespread evidence that delayed-return agricultural systems emerged in tandem with an increased focus on history-making” (p. 6).
This volume includes only two contributions that are not by Near Eastern Neolithic archaeologists. Hodder's introductory chapter supplies some of the connective tissue that pulls the diverse treatments of the various authors into a discussion of the theme that they were asked to address. The core of his chapter is devoted to a discussion of the construction of memory and the key term ‘history-making’. At one level, the repetition of practices within or about the house can result in habituated cultural practices. But it is different where practices were commemorative by design, reflecting the conscious building of social memory. Hodder spends several pages reprising examples of history-making in that latter sense through the Epipalaeolithic and Neolithic periods across South-west Asia, nodding as he goes to the authors of the various chapters that follow. Strangely, given the title of the overall project and the title of the book, religion is notable for its near absence from this discussion.
Some of the chapters are based specifically on research at Çatalhöyük. Other key Neolithic sites currently under excavation in Anatolia (Aşıklı Höyük, Göbekli Tepe, Körtik Tepe) get a chapter each. All three give a short account of the state of knowledge of the site, and offer thoughtful and rewarding discussions of the book's theme. Goring-Morris and Belfer-Cohen make a valuable contribution on the important long-term intensification of history-making through the Epipalaeolithic of the Levant, emphasising that the kinds of history-making of which much is made in the Neolithic were in evidence many millennia earlier. Wendy Matthews, former member of the Çatalhöyük research team, has recently co-directed fieldwork on Final Palaeolithic and Neolithic sites in north-west Iran and north-east Iraq with her husband Roger (also a Çatalhöyük veteran). Her micromorphological analyses allow her to show that the Çatalhöyük scenario of intensely repeated (ritualised) activities is mirrored in many ways in houses and settlements in that distant part of the Fertile Crescent.
Following Hodder's introductory chapter, pride of place in this volume goes to F. LeRon Shults, a theologian and philosopher of religion. Shults is the only person to have participated in all three stages of the project. In this final stage, he recruited a close colleague, Wesley Wiseman, to work with him to develop a dynamic systems model by means of which the authors seek to unravel the complex processes that lead to the formation of a Neolithic mega-site such as Çatalhöyük. In his Introduction, Hodder's use of words like ‘exciting’ and ‘fascinating’ signal the importance that he attaches to their modelling exercise. Shults and Wiseman's work depends a good deal on the expertise that they have developed in the Center for Mind and Culture, which makes it difficult to follow without further reading. Their cause is not helped by the small scale and poor reproduction of the diagrams that illustrate the flow and map the interactions in their Neolithic social investment model.
Hodder points to what he considers to be the most important matter to emerge from the simulation: Shults and Wiseman report that, as the proportion of high intensity increases (to be understood as reliance on delayed-return strategies), at a certain point the social intensity variable (a quantitative proxy for the social aspects of the degree of entanglement present, including religious and ritual practices and behaviours), which has remained low, suddenly becomes unstable before stabilising at a high value. Hodder links this key change in social intensity to the rapid changes in the Çatalhöyük stratigraphy, which he and Harvey Whitehouse have argued marks the transition from an imagistic to a dogmatic mode of religiosity. This reviewer would need to hear a good deal more dialogue between Hodder and the modelling experts to be convinced. Indeed, some might suggest that there was a notable increase in the intensity of social interaction at the very beginning of the Neolithic.
It is regrettable that the quality of reproduction throughout of both line-drawings and half-tones is poor. The page size is not generous and the layout frequently reduces half-tone images to the size of postage stamps; this does no favours for dramatic monuments such as the T-shaped monoliths from Göbekli Tepe, or the superbly crafted chlorite vessels from Körtik Tepe, and it renders invisible details in the excavation photographs on which authors’ texts depend. These faults should not detract from the value of the chapters that document how increasing reliance on delayed-return strategies was attended by increasing density and permanence of settlement, and by increasing focus on ‘history-making’.
