Religion, history and place in the origins of settled life in the Middle East.
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)
This session explores the role of religion and history making in the origin of settled life in the Middle East. There are three particular foci that the session will address. The first concerns the repetitive building of houses or cult buildings in the same place. It can be argued that the long-term social relationships that are characteristic of delayed return agricultural systems need to be based on historical ties to place and to ancestors. At Çatalhöyük history houses have been identified, but repetitive building constructions throughout the Neolithic of the Middle East could have played similar roles. The second focus concerns the possible cosmological layout of settlements. Many Natufian, PPNA and PPNB sites in the Middle East demonstrate a degree of organized layout and sectors have been identified. At Çatalhöyük there is a clear north-south and west-east significance to house and settlement layout. How widely is cosmological patterning found? Third, what is the timing of the emergence of a concern with history making in place and cosmological layout? At what point in regional sequences do such features emerge and with what does their appearance correlate? Can such correlations be used to suggest the causal processes that produced such features?
Other Keywords
Ritual •
Neolithic •
Ceramics •
Ground Stone Tools •
Property •
Social Memory •
social identities •
digital archaeology •
Early Neolithic •
neolithisation
Geographic Keywords
West Asia •
Europe •
South Asia
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-9 of 9)
- Documents (9)
- Aspects of ritual and domestic life in first farming village (PPNB period) : Contribution to Tell Halula (Euphrates Valley Syria) (2015)
- Establishing identities in the Protoneolithic: History making at Göbekli Tepe in the late 10th millennium calBC (2015)
- Evidences for Social Structure and Ritual Practices from Körtik Tepe at the Beginning of Settled Life (2015)
- Interrogating "Property" at Neolithic Çatalhöyük (2015)
- Long-term Memory, the Individual and the Community in the later Prehistory of the Levant (2015)
- The ordering of space at Boncuklu, central Anatolia (8500-7500 cal BC); household and community. (2015)
- Radical Neolithic? (2015)
- Ritual Consumption? Exploring the Staging of Ritual Acts through the Deposition of Ground Stone Tools in Building 77 at Neolithic Çatalhöyük (2015)
- Virtually Rebuilding Çatalhöyük History Houses (2015)