Dr Ian Hodder, of Stanford University, along with Dr Alex Bayliss of the University of Stirling in the UK, will undertake collaborative research in order to build for the first time a detailed chronology for early societal development. Archaeologists have access to data that allow exploration of the broad sweep of human development from small mobile bands to settled towns and cities. But for early prehistoric time periods archaeological chronologies have wide margins of error so that only general trends can be documented. New developments in the statistical analysis of radiocarbon dates are allowing radical new insights so that more detailed chronologies can be built. In this way a historical scale of resolution can be applied to deep prehistory. By tying events down to quarter-century resolution at 9000 years ago, the researchers will be able to examine in more detail the causes that led to important evolutionary changes such as the formation of the first large "mega-sites", the domestication of cattle and the introduction of pottery. The results will transform understanding of the processes that led to settled agricultural life and early urban development. The project will be centered on a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Middle East that is attracting increasing global visitor numbers due to the sustained efforts of project members and the government of Turkey. The initiatives include ambitious educational programs and a wide range of outreach activities so that the results of the research can be widely disseminated and discussed.
Establishing a detailed calendar chronology for a 1000-year period 9000 years ago, will allow study (a) of the pace of change for new innovations such as pottery, milking, domestication of cattle. Researchers will be able to explore whether change comes as a constant, imperceptible stream or as a series of abrupt, punctuated revolutions. The impact of climatic change on societal development during this time period can also be examined and contrasted to other cases. A more detailed chronology will also allow insight into (b) the organization of society because the degree of contemporaneity of adjacent buildings and other structures can be assessed. Finally, it will be possible (c) to explore aspects of religion and ritual. Researchers will be able to study whether in these distant prehistoric times people had a sense of "history" in the sense that they kept and handed down important heirlooms, including animal and human heads, from generation to generation. The research will be based on excavated material from Çatalhöyük in central Turkey. The site was first excavated in the 1960s, and new excavations have continued since 1993. The site has gained renown for its size (13 ha), its well-preserved mud-brick architecture, for its dramatic wall paintings and relief sculpture, and for its 20 m of Neolithic deposits covering over 1000 years. The project will provide precise dating by using Bayesian statistical modelling to combine a series of 650 radiocarbon dates with the detailed stratigraphic record of the modern excavations.
This award was made possible by the SBE-RCUK Lead Agency Agreement.
