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The chipped stone industry from Hallan Çemi and Çayönü shows clear links with the northern Zagros culture province. The Hallan Çemi repertoire includes scalene geometric tools and some rare but distinctive examples of Nemrik-type projectile points (Figure 2.9).43 These are also found at Demirköy, whose artefacts are generally placed between the end of Hallan Çemi and the beginning of Çayönü.44 Missing from Hallan Çemi is any trace of Levantine influence such as the side-notched el-Khiam point.45 These notched points are present, however, in small numbers in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic industry at Çayönü, which has many burins, notched tools, and endscrapers (but few retouched tools, including hollow-based points) that begin to increase by the end of the period. Some of these tools, as well as shaft straighteners, are found at Demirköy.46 Flint was the main medium, with obsidian utilized only rarely at Çayönü. Analysis of the sheen that many stone tools bear along their edge indicates that a wide variety of tasks were performed from food processing to building—the cutting of silicious plants, whether for constructing of superstructures (reeds) or for food, must have been a constant preoccupation.

ROCK ART AND RITUAL

The appearance of art and its implications for cognitive processes has captured interest in Palaeolithic studies generally, yet it is a curiously neglected field in Turkey. Rock art is found in three mountainous regions of Anatolia: (a) the Taurus Mountains starting in the Hakkâri region (Tirs¸in, S¸ at and Çatak), westwards to Palanlı, in Adıyaman, and beyond to Antalya where Beldibi and Özükini are decorated; (b) the easternmost highlands running north from Van (Put Köyü and Bas¸et Dag˘ ı), not far from the Hakkâri group, through Pasinler (Yarnak or Yazılı Cave) and Kars (Kag˘ ızman, Azat and Katran Kazanı); (c) Tekerlek Dag˘ ı, ancient Mount Latmos, in western Anatolia. Collectively, these sites encompass the principal categories of rock art: Pictographs (painted images), petroglyphs (carved, or more precisely, pecked, motifs), and engravings (incisions). Recent advances in dating rock art, whereby minute organic samples are analyzed using accelerator mass spectrometry, have not been applied to any Anatolian rock art site as yet. Samples tested include pigments such as ochres that are mixed with fat, organic particles trapped below the layers of chemical coating (rock varnish) that build up on the rock surface over time, and even the chemical constituents of rock varnish itself (although this technique has its critics). Consequently, the chronology of rock art in Anatolia is still based on the rather subjective approach of placing different styles in a temporal sequence without any firm evidence, stratigraphic or other, to support it. Some of the sites mentioned earlier are ascribed to the Neolithic, but given the vagaries of dating and the relatively small number of studies, they are dealt with here together.

One of the largest concentrations of rock art in the Near East is located about 2850 m above sea level on the Tirs¸in Plateau, in the Hakkâri region.47 Images are either carved or incised on blocks of andesite that are scattered over a vast area, but clustered into two groups within close proximity to each other: Kahn-ı Melkan and Taht-ı Melkan. The majority of representations are

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Figure 2.9 Epipalaeolithic stone tools from Demirköy (1–8, 12–14) and Hallan Çemi (9–11): 1, 2 Nemrik points. 3, 4 Tanged points. 5 Triangular point. 6, 7 Foliate points. 8 Güzir type point. 9–11 Scalene triangles. 12 Obliquely backed point. 13 Lunate. 14 Sickle blade (adapted from Rosenberg 1994; Rosenberg and Peasnall 1998)

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of animals, including wild cattle, bison, ibexes, deer, and wild goats, which are depicted in a realistic or stylized fashion (Figure 2.10). Realistic figures are generally larger in scale, with lines running from back to belly often compartmentalizing the body of the beast, such as in the image of an antelope (Figure 2.10: 4). Bulls are often portrayed with a lowered or turned head and massive shoulders, such as the one depicted on a block over 2 m high (Figure 2.10: 6). We even have a hybrid creature, a two-headed beast, combining features of deer with a bull. Humans are rarely shown, and invariably in a schematic manner, such as the curious and well-endowed male figure with pronounced genitalia, ribs, fingers, and toes (Figure 2.10: 3). A recent redating of the Tirs¸in rock art places it within the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, based largely on stylistic similarities it shares with Göbekli Tepe, especially in the rendering of the bull.48 A nearby site, apparently aceramic Neolithic, and the altitude of the Tirs¸in Plateau that would have precluded occupation before the postglacial optimum are also used to argue for a later date. Another reckoning suggests stylistic comparisons between the animal figures depicted at Palanlı and the Hakkâri Mountains with those painted on Halaf pottery of the sixth millennium BC.49 Even so, firmer evidence would be useful.

In Antalya, Beldibi C has a number of artworks, including a carved fish, an incised image of a bull with its head turned back, and a running stag.50 At Öküzini, a large bull is rendered in a realistic fashion in red paint on the wall, and nearby is a cluster of apparently human stick figures and a schematic ibex. The general similarity this art shares with sites scattered across the Mediterranean, especially Italy, with the relatively rare representations at some Natufian sites has suggested an Epipalaeolithic date. In the first report, Bostancı also published a small pebble (5 cm) from Öküzini that was incised with a crude image of a bovid.51 On closer examination under a microscope, the pebble revealed a more delicate overengraving of the bovid, which was surrounded by schematic “weapons” used in a symbolic hunt (Figure 2.11: 1).52 This seemingly diminutive artefact assumes some significance. In the first instance, despite the absence of bovid bones from Öküzini, artists were clearly familiar with aurochs and had an aptitude in depicting them. It is also important for the similarity it shares with the imagery found on mobiliary and cave art from the late Upper Palaeolithic of western Europe. The representation of the “killing” on the Öküzini pebble is particularly important because microscopic study has shown that not only do the symbolic weapons and wounds reveal different hands at work, they were apparently also incised at different times. This renewal of a ritual killing, or the general practice of renewing prehistoric art, is an activity we will encounter later in the Neolithic, especially at Çatalhöyük.

In the Van region, the canyon that separates the village of Yedisalkım and Bas¸et Mountain is peppered with up to 60 caves, yet only four are decorated with paintings.53 They are all located on the south slope and were deliberately chosen for their difficult access—the lowest is 20 m above ground level, the highest nearly 80 m. The richest gallery is the so-called Cave of Maidens that has over 90 figures executed in red or dark brown paint (Figure 2.12: 1). Whereas the red images are realistically depicted, the dark brown ones are stylized and apparently are the most recent given that they sometimes superimpose the red figures. The cave comprises two

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chambers, both are decorated, Chamber 2 more so, with ceilings heavily blackened from soot. Wild goats and deer are the most commonly depicted animals across sweeping panels; they are well executed, often with a narrow midriff. Humans, both male and female, are generally smaller in size, schematically rendered and usually with their arms outstretched above their heads as if dancing. Sometimes, they are depicted with exaggerated features—thighs and legs (females), and the phallus. Absent are the accoutrements of hunting—bows and arrows, and other hunting gear. Importantly, the overall arrangement of the galleries is not orderly, suggesting the art was rendered at different times and wherever space permitted. The figurative art at Put Köyü (also known as Yes¸ilalıç) is also located in the Van province. They comprise engravings and paintings of humans and animals, mostly goats, and the occasional cross motif.

Further north, in the Kars province, we find rock art in several districts. One is located in the Kag˘ ızman district, in the environs of village of Karaboncuk, also referred to as Çamıs¸lı and Yazılı Kaya.54 Again the remoteness of the site, at an altitude of 3134 m, is conspicuous. Here we find large, smooth-faced panels engraved with many images of animals depicted with precision, especially stags with massive antlers (Figure 2.12: 2). Nearby is another cluster at Çallı, where the sites of Büyük Pano and Küçük Pano show skilfully engraved ibexes with sweeping horns; a lattice motif may represent a hunting net. At Azat, the animals are mostly painted, but they do not appear to be as gracefully executed even if they have suffered from weathering. In Pasinler, we have Yarnak (or Yazılı) Cave, again remote, which has been decorated with red stylized animal and human figures, with the occasional abstract motif.55

The art from Latmos clearly belongs to a different tradition. Here there are no engravings or carvings. Stylized human figures are interspersed with what appear to be reptiles and geometric motifs (dots, vertical zigzags, herringbone, battlements), all executed in red paint (Figure 2.11: 3). The anthropomorphic figures have T-shaped or M-shaped heads, and their arms are often raised. Like other rock art, chronology is problematic. Using the rendering of the female figures, Anneliese Peschlow-Bindokat is inclined to link them to the art of the Hacılar culture of the Late Neolithic.56

So what are we to make of this rich imagery? Any attempt to answer this question requires us to enter the complex and untidy world of human visual perception. Art is a notoriously difficult phenomenon to define, not least because it involves a range of media and activities. It is further complicated by the western notion of aesthetics, an 18th-century construct designed as a set of limited responses to fine arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and music) as distinct from technical or decorative arts. Western appreciation of art requires “beauty” to be judged and emotions to be affected without any reference to context or utility, a state that has been referred to as “disinterested contemplation.”57 These criteria are not generally applicable to nonwestern art, in our case prehistoric art, where the boundaries between the aesthetic and utilitarian, and social and religious activities are blurred. Taking this line of thought, it seems that the production of prehistoric art was probably part of social and ritual events that might have included dancing and miming.

The importance lay not in the production of art—a transient event—but its role in reaffirming

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social cohesion. Indications are not lacking that much of nonwestern art strives not for the effect (the finished product), but for the affect, namely capturing the qualities brought about magically and, perhaps, momentarily by whatever activity is being performed. In the art of the Australian Aborigines, to use a distant example, the act of delineation whether drawing or painting was (and still is) in itself efficacious in some way of solidarity. This best explains why paintings are sometimes executed on top of existing pictures, so as to bring about a chaotic palimpsest of superimposed images. One way of explaining the difference between nonwestern and western art, then, is that in the former the reality and efficacy is in the act performed and the reality captured there and then, rather than in the act communicated and reality repeated. In other words, it could be argued that certain nonwestern art involves a magical process.

This leads us to phosphenes and shamanism, topics that curiously have not been discussed much in Anatolian circles, despite many studies focused on their relevance to Eurasia and prehistoric Europe.58 Briefly, phosphenes are the kaleidoscopic range of images that the human visual system can generate under a range of conditions, including pressure, darkness, sound, and so on. Some have argued that, broadly speaking, these phosphenes bear a striking similarity to the abstract geometric patterns depicted in prehistoric art. Taking it one step further, other researchers believe that these patterns were induced by shamanic practices. Shamanism is an ecstatic religious phenomenon characterized by an ideology of cosmic flight, undertaken for enlightenment or healing and achieved through a trance state. Many religions have mystical exaltations when people speak with the spirit world and become the vehicle for communication with the divine.59 Even though shamanism is most often associated with hunter-gatherer cultures, especially those of Siberia (whence we get the term “shaman,” connoting one who is excited, moved, or raised) it is now recognized that shamanic behavior is ubiquitous. Indeed, in a discussion on the sociology of ecstasy, Lewis cogently argues that “possession” phenomena are universal in character and feature in many religions and societies at various times to the present.60

Just as some art should not be viewed through modern western eyes, so too the defining features of shamanism should not be seen as “irrational” behavior. One such behavior is the altered states of consciousness most shamans experience. These trances are marked by vivid hallucinations, which can be achieved through the ingestion of a hallucinogenic substance, sensory deprivation (absence of light and sound), vigorous dancing, and rhythmic sound (such as drumming and chanting) to mention a few modes. Shamans, who can be either men or women, are possessed by spirits, which they incarnate. Importantly, shamans never lose control over the spirits and it is this command that empowers them reputedly to cure the afflictions of the believer.61 But their other supposed abilities include changing and controlling natural elements such as weather and animal behavior, and predicting the future.

Although one should be careful to avoid making a simple analogy between shamanic practices that have been recorded in the recent past and the material remains in archaeology, there are nonetheless some commonalities that are strikingly similar irrespective of time, place, or society. According to some researchers, these similarities are universal because they are

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responses of the human nervous system while in a state of altered consciousness. These similarities need not detain us here. Suffice to say that three stages of neuropsychological experiences have been identified.62 Briefly, when under a trance a shaman generally first sees moving luminous geometric forms, then attempts to interpret them as more tangible objects, and, finally, in the third stage of trance, the subject can have the sense of traveling through a latticed vortex, which terminates in a bright light, to emerge in a frightening world of intensely real hallucinations, comprising demons, animals, and bizarre settings. In this final state, surroundings become animated and shamans can feel that they change into the animals they see. By becoming their hallucinations, they experience a sense of flight, or to “blend” into the features around them. In line with this argument, then, prehistoric art in Anatolia becomes a more fruitful and engaging field of study if it is divorced from the western notion of aesthetics and viewed within a framework of neuropsychological experiences.

NOTES

1The Palaeolithic is an archaeological stage that is coterminous with the geological epochs from the PlioPleistocene transition to the beginning of the Holocene. More specifically, the Lower Palaeolithic covers the period from the late Pliocene to about the end of the Middle Pleistocene, whereas the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic equate with the Upper Pleistocene.

2Kuhn 2002.

3Harmankaya and Tanındı 1996.

4Gabunia et al. 2000; Lordkipanidze et al. 2008; Vekua et al. 2002.

5Roberts and Wright 1993. The Pliocene is the last geological epoch of the Tertiary geological period. It ended about 1.8 million years ago, when the Pleistocene epoch of the Quaternary period began. The geochronological division of the Pleistocene is as follows: Lower (or Early) began ca. 1.8 million years ago, the Middle about 780,000 years ago, and the Upper (or Late) around 127,000 years ago. It ended around 10,000 years ago, when the Holocene (or postglacial) epoch began. Both the Pleistocene and the Holocene form part of the Quaternary geological period.

6Bottema and van Zeist 1981.

7Erol 1978.

8Karabıyıkog˘ lu et al. 1999; Kuzcuog˘ lu et al. 1999.

9Fairbridge et al. 1997.

10Slimak et al. 2006; Slimak et al. 2008.

11Kappelman et al. 2008.

12Slimak et al. 2006; Slimak et al. 2008.

13Güleç et al. 1999.

14Runnels and Özdog˘ an 2001.

15Arsebük et al. 1992; Stiner et al. 1996.

16Kuhn 2003; Kuhn et al. 1996.

17Kökten 1955; Otte et al. 1995a; Otte et al. 1995c.

18Otte et al. 1998: table 1.

19Otte et al. 1995c.

20López Bayón 1988.

21Runnels 2003.

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22Bar-Yosef 1994; Ljubin and Bosinski 1995.

23Kuhn 2002: 202; Tas¸kıran 1998; Yalcınkaya 1981.

24Runnels 2003. Güven Arsebük (Istanbul University) led investigations at Yarımburgaz Cave, whereas Hallam Movius, an American archaeologist based at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology at Ethnology, was a specialist on Palaeolithic Europe. See also Kuhn 2003: 153–155.

25Runnels 2003: 199–200.

26Kuhn 2003: 153.

27Otte et al. 1995c: 297.

28Kuhn 2002: 207.

29Kuhn 2002: 202.

30Bostancı 1966; Minzoni-Dèroche 1987.

31Kuhn et al. 1999.

32Kuhn et al. 1999.

33Kuhn et al. 2001.

34Kuhn 2002: 205.

35Albrecht et al. 1992; Bostancı 1959, 1962; Esin and Benedict 1963.

36Balkan-Altı 1994a: 143–144.

37Badischen Landesmuseum Karlsruhe 2007. For a Near Eastern perspective, see Aurenche and Kozlowski 1999.

38Watkins 1996.

39Rosenberg 1994, 1999. Baird in Badischen Landesmuseum Karlsruhe (ed.) 2007.

40Bıçakçı 1998; Özdog˘ an 1999: 42–44.

41Özdog˘ an 1999.

42Rosenberg 1994; Rosenberg and Davis 1992; Özkaya and San 2004.

43Rosenberg 1999.

44Rosenberg and Peasnell 1998.

45Caneva et al. 1998; Rosenberg 1999.

46Rosenberg and Peasnell 1998.

47Uyanık 1974.

48Özdog˘ an 2004.

49Mellaart 1975: 162–164.

50Anati 196; Bostancı 1959.

51Bostancı 1959.

52Otte et al. 1995b.

53Belli 2001, 2003b.

54Belli 2006.

55Bas¸gelen 1988.

56Peschlow-Bindokat 2003.

57Winter 2002.

58Bednarik 1990; Clottes and Lewis-Williams 1998; Lewis-Williams 2002; Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2005. For Anatolia, see Sagona and Sagona (forthcoming).

59See, for example, Furst 1972.

60Lewis 2003: 15–31.

61For opposing views on shamanism and spirit possession, see Eliade 1964: 437–440; Lewis 2003: 43–45.

62Helvenson and Bahn 2003.

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3

A NEW SOCIAL ORDER

Pre-Pottery Neolithic (9600–7000 BC)

By the closing phase of the Glacial Period, from about 11,000 BC, the world was fundamentally transformed in two ways. First, global warming led to profound environmental changes, including the rise in sea level caused by the melting of glaciers and the geographical spread of vegetation and animals into temperate areas that were warmer and wetter than before. In the Near East, these ameliorating changes were interrupted by a cold and arid spell called the Younger Dryas (ca. 10,800–9600 BC), which was followed by so-called climatic optimum (ca. 9600–5000 BC), when winter days were mild and the summer nights humid.1

The second transformation was caused by the human response to these ecological adjustments, accelerating social and economic pursuits in new directions. In the Near East, an area that exercised a critical influence on neighboring lands, among the most significant was the shift from mobility to a settled life in villages, which brought with it new social structures. Whereas earlier undertakings very much depended on group cooperation, the acumen of individuals and the nuclear family gradually determined survival and success, with the home (or domus) becoming the focus of activities.

Yet another change was the gradual adoption of farming and with it new technologies, which steadily spread through most of Europe, bringing a more abundant and dependable source of food through cultivation of crops and the domestication of animals. But the most fascinating change related to the human experience itself. Increased complexity of social dynamics heralded novel ways of thinking that were at times expressed in a vivid symbolism through art. Initially, public cult buildings with monumental stone sculptures and later decorated houses equipped with installations gradually transformed the cultural landscape.

So profound and widespread were these changes in human history that their impact has been compared to the Industrial Revolution, which, ironically, ended the pre-eminence of agriculture as the economic propellant. The magnitude of these early postglacial (or Holocene) episodes did

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