From BAR.com
Remarkable Wall Paintings Discovered at Catalhoyuk
Bible and archaeology news
• 09/22/2011
Archaeologists excavating the important Neolithic site of Catalhoyuk* in central Turkey’s Konya Plain have uncovered an elaborate 9,000-year-old wall painting depicting an enigmatic arrangement of brightly-colored geometric shapes. “[The painting] is by far the most intricate and elaborate painting we have found during our excavations here since the mid-90s,” said British archaeologist Ian Hodder of Stanford University who directs the project. “We’ve been waiting quite a long time for something so elaborate.” Hodder remains puzzled over what the painting depicts, although he says it could be a representation of bricks used to form some sort of stylized structure.
* Shahina Farid, “Excavating Catalhoyuk,” Archaeology Odyssey, May/June 2005.
You can find more information from an article at The New York Times:
Houses were “a very important symbol socially and a focus of life at Catal,” he said. “Maybe they were trying to draw the relationship between them and the house but it’s not easy to make sense of it. We have to do more work on it.”
Catalhoyuk — where people occupied mud-brick houses from about 7400 B.C. to about 6000 B.C. — is 60 kilometers, or 37 miles, southeast of Konya in central Turkey. The area is dotted with gently rising mounds that obscure the ancient roots of urbanization and draw archaeologists from around the world.
. . .
“One sort of pattern that we noticed is that the paintings seem to be concentrated around burial platforms,” Dr. Hodder said. “We don’t really understand what that relationship is. Is it a way to communicate with the dead? Another idea would be that the paintings are there to protect people from the dead, or to protect the dead from people.”
. . .
Over more than 1,400 years, as many as 16 layers of housing were formed, each serving as many as 8,000 people. Dr. Hodder’s team has dug through all 16 layers to reach a lake bed from the Pleistocene era.
. . .
The terrain should be ripe for discoveries in the years to come. “We’ve only excavated 4 percent of Catal,” Dr. Hodder said. “What we’ve done is like digging a very small part of New York and then inferring from that what life was like.”
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Archaeologists excavating the important Neolithic site of Catalhoyuk in central Turkey’s Konya Plain have uncovered an elaborate 9,000-year-old wall painting depicting an enigmatic arrangement of brightly-colored geometric shapes.
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* Shahina Farid, “Excavating Catalhoyuk,” Archaeology Odyssey, May/June 2005.
You can find more information from an article at The New York Times:
Into the Stone Age With a Scalpel: A Dig With Clues on Early Urban Life By SUSANNE FOWLER
Published: September 7, 2011
“An interesting aspect of some of the paintings at Catal,” Dr. Hodder said, “is that they are very enigmatic and full of ambiguity and difficult to read.
“But the two main contenders for what this new discovery might show are that it’s simply a geometric design whose meaning is not clear,” he said. “An alternative is that it’s not just a geometric design, but that it is a representation of bricks, some sort of structure,” maybe an early blueprint of some sort. Houses were “a very important symbol socially and a focus of life at Catal,” he said. “Maybe they were trying to draw the relationship between them and the house but it’s not easy to make sense of it. We have to do more work on it.”
Catalhoyuk — where people occupied mud-brick houses from about 7400 B.C. to about 6000 B.C. — is 60 kilometers, or 37 miles, southeast of Konya in central Turkey. The area is dotted with gently rising mounds that obscure the ancient roots of urbanization and draw archaeologists from around the world.
. . .
“One sort of pattern that we noticed is that the paintings seem to be concentrated around burial platforms,” Dr. Hodder said. “We don’t really understand what that relationship is. Is it a way to communicate with the dead? Another idea would be that the paintings are there to protect people from the dead, or to protect the dead from people.”
. . .
Over more than 1,400 years, as many as 16 layers of housing were formed, each serving as many as 8,000 people. Dr. Hodder’s team has dug through all 16 layers to reach a lake bed from the Pleistocene era.
. . .
The terrain should be ripe for discoveries in the years to come. “We’ve only excavated 4 percent of Catal,” Dr. Hodder said. “What we’ve done is like digging a very small part of New York and then inferring from that what life was like.”
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