Sleeping with Dead Mom and Dad at Çatalhöyük September 22, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Prehistoric , trackback
It is late. You walk over to the reed bed and lie down and stare contentedly at the ceiling. The storm is brewing up outside, but the house is sturdy: no rain will wet your family. Outside are good neighbours and strong walls: no invaders will come. The kids are gently snoring off in the annex. Your wife is lying next to you already asleep. And Mom and Dad? Well, they are just under your bed, where you buried them last year… Say what?!
We are in one of the best excavated Neolithic sites in the world, Çatalhöyük, in Turkey. Houses in this small city (Çatalhöyük is often described as a ‘village’ which seems unfair given how big it was for the period) were remarkable. They were rectangular mud-walled houses without doors. To get in you climbed a ladder to the roof and descended down a hole to your cave below. ‘Cave’ is used advisedly here as these early houses are often cast as a halfway point between what we understand as a house and a hunter-gatherer rock womb. For Beach who likes to work in a dark room, and prefers a fire in a cosy kitchen to a picnic in a sunny field this all makes perfect sense. But what about Mom and Dad?
Some ancient cultures, the Romans most famously, removed the dead from among them. The folk of Çatalhöyük kept their dead close. Holes were dug within the house and the dead (presumably relatives) were lowered into the ground in a fetal position under raised platforms: these platforms have generally been interpreted as beds. Çatalhöyük has had two phases of excavation history: one in the 1960s (under Mellaart) and one more recent and ongoing (under Hodder). There have been lots of differences in interpretation between the two phases (matriarchy, anyone), but the bed over the dead has survived. The Catals really did lie down on top of Mom and Dad and baby sis, who got mauled by that leopard back in 6877 BC. What dreams did they have?
For memories of a possible Çatalhöyük volcano
Other strange mortuary practices: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com
