Origins of Settled Life | Ian Hodder | Talks at Google

The ritual origins of settled life in the Middle East: Göbekli and Çatalhöyük.

Recent archaeological discoveries have upturned our theories about the origins of agriculture and the dawn of settled life. While climate change and economic adaptation have long been seen as prime causes, recent work at Göbekli and Çatalhöyük in Turkey has shown that social gatherings at ritual centers played a key role. The remarkable finds at Göbekli include 6 meter stone monoliths carved with images of animals and birds and forming ritual enclosures. Recent research at Çatalhöyük shows a fully fledged town in which wild bulls, leopards and the severed heads of ancestors were important social foci.

Ian Hodder was trained at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London and at Cambridge University where he obtained his PhD in 1975. After a brief period teaching at Leeds, he returned to Cambridge where he taught until 1999. During that time he became Professor of Archaeology and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. In 1999 he moved to teach at Stanford University as Dunlevie Family Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Stanford Archaeology Center. His main large-scale excavation projects have been at Haddenham in the east of England and at Çatalhöyük in Turkey where he has worked since 1993. He has been awarded the Oscar Montelius medal by the Swedish Society of Antiquaries, the Huxley Memorial Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute, has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and has Honorary Doctorates from Bristol and Leiden Universities. His main books include Spatial analysis in archaeology (1976 CUP), Symbols in action (1982 CUP), Reading the past (1986 CUP), The domestication of Europe (1990 Blackwell), The archaeological process (1999 Blackwell), The leopard’s tale: revealing the mysteries of Çatalhöyük (2006 Thames and Hudson), Entangled. An archaeology of the relationships between humans and things (2012 Wiley Blackwell).

This Authors at Google talk was hosted by Boris Debic.

[greatgambino]

Don't understand on what basis you can conclude the Göbekli peoples were hunter gatherers. First, no actual living sites for those who built these temple structures have been excavated. The German archeologist said that was perplexing however only about 5% of the entire site has been looked at so far. But even more disturbing is the that this individual completely fails to mention that Göbekli was deliberately buried, not covered by age. It appears he is the classic typical archeologist that throws out anything that doesn't agree with accepted theories, rather than revisiting their accepted theories and changing them. I think it is ridiculous that anyone thinks that hunter gathers one day just got together put down their spears and hunting bows, and said, "lets build this giant megalithic structure, lets make the carving really tedious in relief rather than just chiseling, and then when we get all done, lets bury the whole thing!" Rubbish!

[susanmcdonald]

please, google, keep the visual focus on the photos & maps! so irritating to watch the speaker walk around & pointing at stuff, we know not what, & when there are closeups of the pictures & maps, two seconds is not enough time to absorb anything of value to the viewer...grrrr

[carymartin]

The interesting thing is that a bunch of hunter gatherers did not just decide to build these on the spur of the moment, they must have been developing stone carving and monument creation for quite a while to gain the skills needed to create these structures. Somewhere there must be the remains of their progress around the learning curve leading to all this.

[justinmoore]

The articulation of the time depth and entanglement issues, near the end, as a root of settlement is a good contribution to thinking about civilizations' emergence.

[BillyLongshot]

A rather funny thought experiment crossed my mind as I was nearing the end of this presentation: say we could travel in time and ask those Neolithic people why they had such an elaborate or 'entangled' social structure. Their answer is simple: " So a 21st-century university professor could justify their tenure by showcasing their ability to work with high levels of complexity, especially in the form of information-glutted scatter graphs."

Joking aside, I just did not find his theory convincing. I thought it was highly speculative to build a whole theory of social organisation based solely on kinship relations derived from teeth. So the answer to the burning question of why did people first decide to band together is that they came together to be part of a network.

Which is not saying much, probably because it sounds a lot like circular reasoning if you pay attention to the words. Networks are basically people coming together. So a translation from academese is: people come together so that they can come together. Wow... very illuminating.

Also for social security. I mean, sure, that's what packs of animals do too, you don't need etnographic studies. The thing is, why did these people settle down and build houses at this particular time in history and not earlier. And couldn't you also apply 'entanglement' to packs of hunter animals too? To me, it sounds less like a clarifying concept and more like a projection of one's confused state of mind. I mean, no wonder, if you just put all of your scientific hopes in the basket of 'quantitative data'.

What I found more illuminating was the very nice observation that the scenes with people surrounding animals were incorrectly tagged as hunting scenes, and that, in fact, they were 'teasing and baiting' the animals. I wonder why. I mean you can always say it was part of some religious ritual, sure. But it can also be something else at the same time. The playful attitude towards the animal is reminiscent of the act of taming. It could be that their religious ritual was also an act of 'remembering' their success with domestication. With so much symbolic emphasis on cow horns, it could very well be the event that changed their hunting lifestyle so dramatically and created the incentive for those people to settle in one place and build durable houses.

Sorry, but going against the Marxist - was it? - idea that you need domestication first and then you get settlements just doesn't make sense. Wild animals are, well, wild. They will not hang around your village just because you need a food source. You need to follow them around and move on to a new place once they become scarce. Sure, you don't like Marxism and communism failed miserably. But come on, if you say building houses had nothing to do with the economy, that is with a steady source of food, you are going against common sense. Also, if you say that the village was an early form of social security, well, that is actually an economic explanation (Marxist, hehe). But I just don't think you could go and get food from the Flintstones next door just because Fred is your fifth cousin once removed. They also need to have some meat lying around in the first place.

I don't really expect to get a reply but it's already enough that it got me thinking about these fascinating discoveries. Also, I think that a lot of the work done on these sites is extremely valuable and I am grateful for this post being made publicly available on youtube.

[spartakos]

i'm a student who is turkish. i was born in constantinopole, but my father was born in konya(iconium)


i have travelled to çatalhöyük several times so far. four times visited to konya archeologic museum!

çatalhöyük is masterpiece which is unique! first settlement in worldwide!

[DipityS]

Really pleased this fascinating talk popped up - absolutely astounds me how these clever people can ferret out these ancient secrets and then weave them together to give me a glimpse into such distant people.

[shadybrooksheep]

When he points to the visual, it would be nice to pan UP so we can see what he is talking about. It takes more than a split second to see so better not to return the camera to the back of the speakers head.

[TheTeacher]

Fascinating. It’s always interesting to hear an intelligent explanation of others’ theories. Thanks for posting.

[TheTeacher]

I enjoyed speaker’s calm and measured delivery, and use of terms that non-archaeologists can understand. Do wish we could have seen more of the slides as they were being discussed.

[Aluminata]

Easy to see why he chose this type of interest - he is absolutely transfixed with facination.

[edofiron]

Nice presentation but Dr. Hodder's comment that Hunter Gatherers were responsible for Gobekli is not plausible. The degree of engineering required to carve, transport, and position these monuments is astounding. For example the reliefs carved onto the stones are raised not embedded or carved into. They were placed onto the stone as they were quarried and the rock removed. Moving 15 ton rocks that slender requires modern day engineering techniques.... Why was this not discussed or even acknowledged? This would demand a dedicated group of skilled artisans and
stone cutting engineers. The people responsible for this site invested hundreds of years into its development and yet intentionally buried it completely for some unknown reason. His explanation of the the reliefs was somewhat confusing and dismissed as some form of ritual/spiritial center. But of course this is true but you don't need a PHD in archeology to come to that conclusion. I was hoping for deeper analysis.

[heartsky]

Göbekli is turning archeology on its head. You would never know that from watching this guy...

[williamfritz]

Wish someone would publish photos of a couple of completed PhD dissertations in archaeology. The amount of work, of collection and classification and theoretical deliberation is perfectly stunning. The way our ancient archeology cowboys deride them says more about our civilization than the ones they love to speculate about. It ought to be possible to enjoy alternative conceptions and even test them for serious plausibility without trashing the integrity, fairness and value of 'mainline' scholars.

[smutler]

those hunter gatherers at GT did a pretty good job for a first go at monumental stone masonry, with no drafting, logistical or geometrical knowledge. I'd be well pleased with those carvings after a weeks course down the local polytechnic and all the modern tools, almost like they were civilized and food was brought to the site rather than growing it right next to the most sacred site this society had. Maybe they did it at the weekends after hunting all week?

[jakking]

This entire lecture is spoiled by the camera's insistence on following Hodder about instead of staying on the images that he is discussing.

[dongarry]

how about training the pinheads on the camera's to focus on the [[ scenes /pictures/subjects/maps/etc., rather than the speaker's/narrator's etc., we know what ''they'' look like HELLOW!

[berber]

Very good lecture. Thank you. I wish perhaps you could have elaborated on putting GTepe and CH in the larger picture of ancient sites - as witnessed by a quetion coming after the lecture. In particular, is there any relation to the "nearby" areas like Bactria, Vinca /Tripilla, and, above all, Stone Grave culture north of the Black Sea?

[axekicker]

The carvings are actually neolithic storyboards. A story-teller/shaman would use the pictograms to create stories for the people, like movie night. Violence, sex, adventure. It's entertainment/ritual. Lots of monsters, lots of options for great story-telling.

The dude is clearly an EBE, that lives in a completely different world from ours. He managed to turn a fascinating subject into something unbearably dull and boring. It takes an insanely inhumane, and highly developed intellligence to do such a thing. It almost looked like he himself would fall asleep at any moment while delighting us with this endless, monotonous mumbling.