Posted on 07/26/2007 12:21:04 PM PDT by blam
Spiral wall motifs reveal Çatalhöyük migration
In the course of an excavation project currently under way at Çatalhöyük, researchers have recently discovered a burial chamber and wall paintings that echo spiral motifs first seen on ancient seals and kitchen utensils.
Motifs discovered in the wall paintings may shed light on the migration routes of the people who lived in Çatalhöyük, a 9,000-year old Neolithic site.
Çatalhöyük is a 9,000-year-old Neolithic site in central Turkey that displays evidence of animal domestication and agricultural activities and is considered to be one of the first permanent community settlements. The excavation is sponsored by Boeing and Yapı Kredi and is led by Professor Ian Hodder, who has been conducting the excavations since 1993 in order to better understand how and why people first domesticated plants and animals and established cities.
More than 100 experts from various disciplines and archaeologists from the US, England and Poland have been working jointly in laboratories next to the excavation site.
Archaeologist Banu Aydınoğlugil, an assistant on the Çatalhöyük excavation, noted that the most significant difference of Çatalhöyük from other Neolithic sites is the presence of preserved reliefs and pictures on the walls.
Strong archaeological interest in Çatalhöyük
Aydınoğlugil stated that Çatalhöyük is very popular among archaeologists around the world and that many archaeologists are eager to conduct excavations here. Saying that Çatalhöyük displays urban planning and an egalitarian societal structure, Aydınoğlugil described the site: “The houses in Çatalhöyük were made of sun-dried brick and there were doors and roofs on these houses. The houses were adjacent and no house was superior to another, which can be indicated as a sign of their egalitarian structure of society. They did not have a leader and they lived in peace.”
In Çatalhöyük, only 5 percent of which has been excavated up to now, a group of archaeologists from Poland’s Poznan University recently discovered the first burial chamber at the site.
Dr. Arek Marciniak, an archaeologist from a Polish excavation team, said that they came across skeletons buried in the floor of the room and they were quite happy to see a specially designed burial chamber for the first time. Marciniak also said: “On the walls of this room we saw some motifs, which we first thought to have been carved out by a bone. We saw spiral motifs that we had seen on seals and kitchen utensils before. We predict that these motifs on the walls are the source of the motifs that are used on kitchen utensils.”
Marciniak highlighted that they had seen these motifs on seals and kitchen utensils that were found in mounds in Central Anatolia. “What is more important is that the objects bearing these motifs will be analyzed and thus we can maybe find the migration routes of people living in Çatalhöyük. This might be a step forward to shedding light on the adventure of humanity in the world,” said Marciniak.
Remember that Cherchen Man (one of the 2000BC mummies found in China) had this spiral painted on his face.
Cherchen Man
I call bullsh**.
L
Didn’t you get the memo? The whole world lived in an egalitarian paradise until 1776. That’s when the fighting broke out and all the trouble started.
How do they know it wasn't they other way around?
Archeologists are such inveterate bs'ers....
"OH this means they ate nothing but flowers and butterflies, never fought with their wives, and all of their children were above average..."
What utter crap.
L
“The houses were adjacent and no house was superior to another, which can be indicated as a sign of their egalitarian structure of society. They did not have a leader and they lived in peace.”
Oooo did they find a book telling them so?
Otherwise, its wishful bs.
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Unless they found a fossilized "one-finger salute", I'm not sure how they arrived at their conclusion.
Or it can be indicated that this was a block of cheap rental units and the landlord was a d***head with crummy taste.
L
Who writes the scripts for these guys?
The spiral is a sure indication of Ammonite worship.
I absolutely love the drivel that some archeologists put out when trying to explain a site using their own biases and stereotypes.
“The houses were adjacent and no house was superior to another, which can be indicated as a sign of their egalitarian structure of society.”
Remember this song, deriding the culture of sameness:
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,1
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
And the people in the houses
All went to the caves
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s hunters and farmers,
And spell-binding shamans,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
Or “They did not have a leader and they lived in peace.”
Then why did they need doors and bury their neighbors under the floor?
I thought the Pope was the nominal leader of the Çatalhöyüks....at least the Roman Çatalhöyüks ;-)
Pinging the Çatalhöyük Ping List.
They found what they were looking for. Earlier interpertations say the entrance in the top was a defensive action.
I couldn't force myself to post this one.
I’m not sure about the Pope being involved, but surely they created the Catahoula cattle dog breed.
These schmucks make me puke. When European archeologists were working in Turkey on some of the finest Roman ruins comprised of summer homes, theatres, etc. that contained the finest mosaics ever discovered, the government of Turkey said they couldn’t wait for the excavation to be completed or the objects removed. They closed the project and flooded the entire valley as part of an electrohydratic dam system for the great future of Turkey. Needless to say, no one will ever see those Roman ruins at the bottom of a deep lake. So much for their love of archeology.
As a retired miner who worked for Newmont Gold (Carlin Gold), I understand just where this idiot is coming from. The environmental assessment done before the Gold Quarry Pit was opened traced the local plants and animals back some 20,000 years through varied climates and conditions. The Native Americans impact was minimal because the environment was generally harsh and difficult.
The impact of the mines (and there are a lot of them) is minimal except in the actual pits and mill sites which comprise a tiny percent of the land. However there was a constant stream of environmentalists photographing the open pits and the supposed poisoning of all with cyanide. You repeat something long and often enough and it becomes fact.
The height of absurdity was reached when the EPA turned down another company I worked for, Magma Copper's application to mine and restore the old Ruth Pit on the grounds that it would due irreparable damage to the landscape of the area. Ruth Pit is yet an empty hole in the ground that will never be reclaimed because it was closed prior to the reclamation laws.
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