Settling in

It's my first proper working day on site this season and I'm slowly working my way through Sarah's documentation of the database work and general IT issues she's encountered while she was here. At this stage, I only have one major 'new' application to work on, and in large part that's thanks to Sarah's hard work over the past months, both on- and off-site.

I'm hoping that now that the hard grunt work of centralising, bug fixing, cleaning and consolidating the existing databases over the past few years is (mostly) over, and the applications I created in previous years are bedded in, I'll have a real chance to think about what else we can do with all this data. I was so busy before I left London that I hadn't really had a chance to get excited about coming back to Catalhoyuk but as soon as I was on my way I realised that this could be an immensely intellectually rich and rewarding two weeks.

There's always so much new technology, I'm sure there's a knack to not getting carried away by every new possibility. But I can't help but wonder what would happen if we recreated Catalhoyuk in Second Life or another 3D world. Imagine re-populating the mound with a living community of real people!

I'd love to see how we could use semantic web/Web 2.0 technologies to open up our data to the rest of the world. I'm interested in the tagging technologies emerging through folksonomies like steve.museum, and wonder if we could apply them to the finds data we publish on the web.

I've realised that you could almost think of the excavation diary entries as blog posts, in which case Catalhoyuk has a blog that goes back to 1997.

Ovens, Hearths and Firins

Still working hard to get through the 2004 material – should be done tomorrow. Things are slower as I take segments of the day to work on my oven/hearth project and the community archaeology project. Burcu and I continue to visit local villages interviewing people about their ideas about archaeology and their uses of clay. We have learned a great deal about making and using ovens and hearths – and about cooking in general.

We’ve seen about 10 different ovens, hearths, and tandirs (breadoven). Everyone seems to have their own way of making it. One thing I noticed is that our friend Saliha, who lives in Kücükköy has an oven and hearth similar to her mother’s, who lives in Abdatolu. This made me wonder if the variation we see in ovens and hearths is due to the knowledge women pass from one generation to the next, learning from their mother. That may account for the variation we have seen in the local villages and it may have something to do with the production practices at Çatalhöyük.

We talked to one women (Azize) who brought the clay from her oven all the way from Antalya. Other women – most of them – get the clay and plaster material locally. We went to visit some of the locations where they get their clay and Burcu collected samples. I’ve been asking a lot questions about which foods are cooked in the hearth and which in the oven. I’m trying to understand the difference between the bread oven (tandir), the hearth (ocak) and an upright oven (firin). Some women have all of these and use a different fire installation to cook different foods or use one of them in the winter and the other(s) in the warmer months.

It’s been fantastic to learn about how the ovens are made, who makes them (mostly women, (but in one village the men make the ovens), and how they are destroyed, repaired, replastered, and rebuilt. This is incredibly helpful for our work at Çatalhöyük since it can help us to understand the ovens and hearths we find on site. This, in turn, helps us understand the cooking practices. There are no clay ball used in contemporary local villages, but there are clay ovens!
Here’s a photo of one of the oven-hearth combos we saw. This is Hacer’s oven – in Kücükköy. The tandir (bread oven) is the large circular part of the fire installation and the open air hearth (toward the front of the photo) is used for making most other food.


One of the best parts of all of this is meeting these fantastic women and hearing about their lives and the pride they take in feeding their family. The wonderful food they give us from these ovens during our visits is a special treat. It’s absolutely true what they say ….there is nothing like Turkish hospitality.

Reconstruction

Today I’ve nearly finished looking at all the clay balls from the South area that were excavated in 2004. It is amazing how few clay balls there are in the upper levels. I can’t believe that all the clay balls excavated in 2004 fit into one case! That is unbelievable. Compared to other years where there are 5-6 or more crates filled with balls and that is only from the South area. It is a clear change that we can see on the site.

Burcu helped me with the clay balls today for a brief time. She walked by my desk and saw that I was working on fitting several broken pieces of a large clay ball from one unit back together. I was getting a bit frustrated and she said she’d take over. We worked on the ball for about an hour and it is nearly completely refit now. That is all thanks to Burcu – I was far too impatient for refitting today. Some days are good for refitting, but not today. Today is a recording day. I need to feel particularly patient to work on refitting pieces.

Here’s the reconstructed clay ball – from unit 10518. It’s piece number is 10518m1. And here’s Burcu – she had the magic fingers today!