The Leopard's Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Catalhoyuk

by Ian Hodder

Book Overview

Ian Hodder gives a first-hand account of his major discoveries at the renowned archaeological site Catalhoyuk in Turkey. This tour de force of archaeological writing offers many insights into past... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0500051410
• ISBN13: 9780500051412
• Release Date: June 2006
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 2.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.9" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Decent overview

I really enjoyed this book. Yes, it is dry and academic, but thats a plus in my opinion. I believe the author was very controlled and fair minded in his appraisal of Catalhoyuk. This becomes very apparent when agendas from a few social-political groups, good intentioned or not, have less than delicately attempted to co-opt Catalhoyuk. The author's patience is apparent, as well as his tact. It is really difficult to read any agenda he may have in this book. Again, I say good, because I won't be making any leaps into wishful thinking.

Challenging the paradigm

Catalhoyuk is an archaeological site in Anatolia in Turkey, where the remains of a "town" densely occupied from the Neolithic age (about 7500 BCE) though the Chalcolithic (early use of Copper, about 6000 BCE) have been excavated. What is remarkable about this site is the symbolic art that has been found there: Skulls of wild bulls and parts of other wild animals are plastered on to the walls of the houses, which are also decorated with many paintings of wild animal hunts; the human participants of these scenes often wear what look like leopard skins, and illustrations of leopards - usually in pairs - abound throughout the site. The book - written by the Director of Research at Catalhoyuk - is subtitled, perhaps ironically, "The Leopard's Tale", as hardly a trace of a leopard was found among the faunal remains at the site through many seasons of excavation. This contrast is one of many; the domestic animal remains found at the site were mainly sheep and goats, but no parts of these animals were ever plastered to the walls, nor do they find their way into the wall painting. Activities within the house were evidently carefully regulated and differentiated: People were buried under the floors of the houses; these burials were almost invariably close to the north and east walls of the house. Domestic activities - food preparation and cooking - were always carried out in the south part of the house, where the walls were undecorated. The floor areas within the house clearly demarcated these different areas - often with slightly different levels or raised edges, and with the use of different types and colors of flooring material. The author uses these and other recurrent patterns in the material remains at Catalhoyuk to develop a picture of the worldview of these ancient inhabitants - their social and economic life, the roles of men and women, and their spiritual concepts. This process - extrapolating from the material culture of prehistoric sites to the sociology, psychology and religion of the inhabitants - is known as Cognitive Archaeology. It is of course far more speculative than when dealing with more recent cultures, where written sources are available to supplement and provide context for the archaeological finds. However, as more and more prehistoric sites - from different parts of the world - are examined in this way, certain broad common themes are starting to emerge, enabling the field of cognitive archaeology to develop principles and disciplines of interpretation. A theme that the author returns to throughout the book is that of the relationship between the activities motivated by symbolic/ritualistic needs - like using a particular type of lime to plaster a floor of the house after a burial - and the social or domestic activities needed to support them - for example, cooperative arrangements with other households to locate the limestone and burn it. He calls this process "entanglement", and describes how one type of entanglement w

Interesting account and a wonderful illustration of modern archaeology

I bought the Leopard's Tale because I had read another book, Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos, and the Realm of the Gods, which mentioned that new excavations had recently been conducted on Mellart's old site, Çatalhöyük. Discovered in the 1950's and assessed the oldest agricultural settlement, it wasn't excavated until the early `60's and the popular account of the site was interesting and exciting to read. The Leopard's Tale reveals, more than anything else, how much the discipline of archaeology has progressed over the last several decades. Much more is made of the details sieved from the debris from the site than had been the case on this or any other site. Archaeology has incorporated a multidisciplinary approach to its assessment of ancient sites that provides a glimpse of the realities of life during the period of deposition. Climate, paleosols, topography and relationship with other sites are just a few of the new features presented. The author, Ian Hodder, writes a very readable book for the lay person about the recent work on the Turkish site. He mentions data taken from paleontology, zooarchaology, palenology, geology and other sources that fill in for the reader a vision of life at the time Çatalhöyük was a living residential site. Many of Mellart's original interpretations of artifactual and architectural remains have been given an update that takes into account the information from the scientific approaches to the site presently being conducted. The odd title of the book arises from the fact that leopards coexisted in Turkey during the site's occupation, and they feature prominently in the visual record from the site in the forms of paintings of the animal, relief sculpture of it, and in possible depictions of people wearing the animal's skin or material designed to look like its signature rosettes. Using this as a starting point, Hodder attempts to discern the mental outlook of the inhabitants in respect to their enculturalization, their religious frame of reference, their approach to group living, their choice of architecture, and so on, working around this main theme. Using ethnographic evidence drawn for cultural studies among modern groups who display similar material and spatial characteristics, he attempts to interpret the context in which the individual spent his or her life at Çatalhöyük and the effect that this milieu had on the individual's personal frame of reference. I've taken an interest in mind/brain studies and in the plasticity of the nervous system recently and I'm inclined to agree with the author that the environment and personal experience definitely shape the brain and what can be assumed "possible." One of the more recent books I've read on the topic is ."The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (James H. Silberman Books), and the information I gleaned from this title certainly bears weight on Dr. Hodder's interpretation of th

The neolitic in Catalhoyuk

The book concentrates on the social aspect of the people living in Catalhoyuk. Their living quarters, their food, agriculture, animal husbandry, artwork on the walls, pots, where they burried their dead, how they built one house upon the other, etc. It brings you a community alive and fascinating.

Exciting and Enlighting Story of Humankind at the Dawn of Agriculture

At last a comprehensive, readable account of the most recent archaeological work at Catalhoyuk. Ian Hodder gives us many beautiful pictures of artifacts as well as diagrams and charts that build a picture of what was found. Trying to avoid making assumptions based on our modern worldview, he carefully makes deductions from the data and builds up a picture of the inhabitants and what it must have been like to live there. As much as the "Goddess Community" would like to stay with earlier assumptions, the data does not support a female centered society or religion at the site. Instead a much more balanced and egalitarian life and spirituality seems to be attested to. The earlier images of powerful and dangerous wild animals that once were painted on cave walls are echoed and elaborated on the walls of the close-packed mud brick houses of Catalhoyuk. Their walls celebrated the power of the wild bull and boar even as their sustenance increasingly depended on domesticated sheep and goats and cultivated agricultural products. There have been no large public buildings or palaces found. The center of life and production appears to have been the individual home. The focus seems to have been the family and it's ancestors, many of whom are buried beneath platforms in the houses. Elders probably made decisions for the community. Houses were built atop their predecessors so that the site seems like a large layer cake. Families cooperated in caring for fields and flocks and for supplying wild animals for feasting. They had excellent sources of mud for bricks and plaster for their walls nearby and obtained obsidian for tools from sources 100 miles away. We are used to viewing the history of "Civilization" as based on the gaining of power by some and the subjugation of others. The "winners" celebrate their prowess in monuments built by the rest. This work shows that it wasn't always that way. The settlement at Catalhoyuk seems to connect to later Minoan Civilization as it is coming to light in excavations in Santorini. (See Unearthing Atlantis by Charles Pellegrino.) I recommend this book to anyone even remotely interested in the history and possibilities of humankind.