P R E - P O T T E R Y N E O L I T H I C

The last Pre-Pottery building phase at Çayönü (subphase 8) is poorly documented, but the settlement, now much smaller, was different enough to warrant the term “Large Room.”55 New planning concepts were clearly in force, which disregarded most of the earlier sense of uniformity in regard to planning, orientation, and construction techniques. Buildings consisted of one or two large rooms with clay floors and generally were not as well constructed. Only stones were used if the house walls were thin, but for the wider foundations that were now set in trenches, mud bricks were deemed more suitable.

North of the Taurus Mountains

The picture from central Anatolia is vastly different. We have no sense of an extended or evolving Pre-Pottery Neolithic sequence as exists in the southeast, rather we are confronted at the outset with a handful of sites of Pre-Pottery Neolithic B date, chief among them Pınarbas¸ı A, As¸ıklı Höyük, Kaletepe, and Musular. Of these, As¸ıklı Höyük is a fully fledged settlement and best demonstrates the indigenous character of the Early Neolithic of central Anatolia, from which Çatalhöyük, Hacılar, and Can Hasan descended.56

As¸ıklı’s settlement plan, architectural concepts and material assemblage do not resemble any known cultural horizon from either southeastern Anatolia or the Levant. Three principal levels (designated 1–3 from top to bottom) and numerous superimposed building phases with minimal variation in conceptual planning were defined at As¸ıklı. Level 2 affords a clear plan of a village—tightly packed houses conforming to the so-called agglutinative plan—with an enclosure wall surviving along the eastern edge of the settlement (Figure 3.6). The village is divided in two by a cobble-paved road that runs from the banks of the Melendiz River through the southwestern corner of the settlement. South of the road is a complex of structures (HV) and a large, red painted room (designated T), most likely public monuments. To the north is the residential quarter, with a few neighborhoods defined by narrow alleyways 0.5–1.0 m wide, but on the whole there is very little space between the structures. Remains from the few courtyards around the settlement suggest that they served as work spaces and dumps, as the accumulation of debris from Trench 4 G–H reveals. Here, it seems, the residents knapped obsidian, worked antler and bone into tools, and also processed their food.

Domestic structures at As¸ıklı were built of long and wide mud bricks—up to 100 cm in length and 30 cm wide—set directly onto the ground; one cluster of buildings, constructed late in Level 2, was founded on stone blocks. Each house had independent walls, and comprised a single room, mostly likely a workshop, or a group of two to three rooms joined by doorways. Access into the house, however, was through the roof and down a portable ladder. None of the houses had a front door, so communication between houses was across the roofs, which were probably at different heights. Postholes were discerned as shallow discoloration surrounded by stones. Houses are rectangular or subrectangular in plan and have very few storage facilities.57 The exception is House TM that had a couple of storage bins, one circular and sunken into the floor,

54

P R E - P O T T E R Y N E O L I T H I C

along the north wall. Hearths are generally nestled into a corner of the one-roomed houses and paved with large pebbles; large flat stones set vertically into the floor or a canal to capture the ash defined their edge. Floors consisted of two layers—a basal layer of small pebbles and a thick topcoat of clay; in some rooms woven mats were spread across the floors.58 Walls, too, were coated with mud, on both the inside and outside, and sometimes at regular intervals. The interior walls of some rooms revealed traces of fugitive colors—red, pink, and yellow. At As¸ıklı some of the dead were kept close to the living—buried in simple earthen pits under floors. Despite the 400 rooms or so that have been exposed, only 70 burials have been found, suggesting there may be a nearby cemetery. The deceased were laid to rest in a variety of positions—foetal, on their back, or on their side bent at the knees.59

A combination of excavation and surface stripping exposed a similar though less extensive plan at Can Hasan III, in the southern plateau.60 The tops of walls revealed a complex of tightly packed rectilinear structures many of which did not share a party wall. Houses have walls constructed mostly of beaten earth (pisé), although some mud bricks were found; wood, by way of contrast, does not appear to have been used for reinforcement. Houses did not have doorways, again pointing to a roof entrance. The practice of building houses directly on top of the wall lines of earlier structures also foreshadows the practice at Çatalhöyük. Room interiors are mud plastered and occasionally painted red. Some floor surfaces are particularly hard and compact, and strengthened by a mixture of small pebbles. Two ovens were found. They were built of clay and embedded into the wall.

Suberde Level III shows poorly preserved remains of mud brick buildings with plastered floors, and burnt fragments of wattle and daub, probably from roof or partitions.61 Suberde is of much later date (7650–6750 BC) and, according to Duru, the lack of pottery (except for a few sherds in the uppermost prehistoric deposits, some large clay bins and fragments of clay figurines) may be an intentional cultural practice rather than chronological indicator.62 The wild boar paraphernalia—tusks, figurines and bones—is suggestive of cultic practice.

In western Anatolia, the occurrence of a pre-pottery phase is rather vague. Evidence is emerging from Çalca and Keciçayırı, but at present mostly in the form of a typology from surface finds and soundings, including pressure flaking technology, projectile points, edge ground axes, and bone spoons and hooks.63 A clear stratigraphy would certainly help to resolve the issue of the earliest levels at the small mound of Hacılar, termed “Aceramic Hacılar I–VII” by Mellaart, but reclassified to the Early Pottery Neolithic by Duru.64 The basis of this rethinking is a small number of plain, dark-faced sherds found in situ on a red floor reached in one of 28 exploratory trenches dug in the plain around the small mound. Tempting though this suggestion is, without a stratigraphic link between Mellaart’s aceramic floor and that found by Duru it must remain a possibility only. We do not have a coherent plan of the settlement of Aceramic Hacılar I–VII available, owing to the restricted size of the sounding in the lowest deposits, but features such as the use of large mud bricks link it to As¸ıklı.65 It is not clear whether houses shared a wall, or where doorways are evident. Floors had a base of small pebbles, coated with a layer lime plastered, stained red and burnished, which continued up the wall forming a dado; replastering

56