A N AT O L I A T R A N S F O R M E D

EARLY AND MIDDLE CHALCOLITHIC (ca. 6000–4000 BC)

With the commencement of the Early Chalcolithic period we enter a somewhat obscure period, but no less significant. Indeed, falling between the two “revolutions”—agricultural and urban— it is important as the seedbed for aspects of complexity that led to major sociopolitical changes in the late fourth millennium BC. At the same time it is an elusive interlude to define. For the greater part of Anatolia the transition from the Late Neolithic to the Early Chalcolithic (ca. 6000 BC) does show change but not enough to suggest a major break of tradition.115 If factors other than adoption of copper metallurgy conventionally used to define the Chalcolithic are taken into account, the significance of the transition from the Neolithic is reduced. Indeed, in many respects the character of Early Chalcolithic cultures was essentially Neolithic.116 Stone continued to be the preferred medium for tool technology with copper artefacts, few in number and range, largely produced for prestige purposes. The economic basis of village life remained largely unchanged, too.

Even so, in Cappadocia the slump in the number of permanently occupied settlements experienced at the end of the Neolithic was reversed with the establishment of new villages that nonetheless avoided old sites. While settlement patterns around the Konya region remained basically the same, even though there was shift from Çatalhöyük East to Çatalhöyük West, portable hearths and a new type of pottery point to different modes of cooking.117 Obsidian tools also changed, no longer displaying the sophistication of prismatic blades.

Then, around 5500 BC, the beginning of what we conventionally term the Middle Chalcolithic, many sequences north of the Taurus Mountains ceased, leading Ulf-Dietrich Schoop to reckon that “the greater part of the second half of the sixth millennium may still be considered a ‘dark age’ in respect to our knowledge of cultural development.”118 Shortly after this curious stretch, in the Late Chalcolithic period (which we shall discuss in the next chapter) there was a change of tempo in social organization and innovation that led to an upsurge in technological advancements. Across Anatolia centres of populations had also established networks of communications with distant lands.

Like so many periods, the Chalcolithic is bedevilled by considerable confusion over chronology and nomenclature. A bewildering set of inconsistencies has made it difficult to understand the unfolding of cultural developments after the Neolithic. At the base of this confusion are the seemingly incompatible Near Eastern and Aegean chronologies, which have sandwiched Anatolia in a collision of terms and dates. In eastern Turkey, for instance, indigenous Anatolian sequences need to be keyed into the broader and established framework of Greater Mesopotamia and the perplexing chronology of Trans-Caucasia, which has its own peculiar problems.119 Meanwhile, the central and western areas of Turkey rub uneasily with the Aegean sequence, whereas sites along Black Sea littoral jockey within the framework of Greater Eurasia, or the so-called Circumpontic zone.120 Schoop has discussed these problems and those associated with early methods of excavations in a thorough and persuasive study.121

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