The Entanglement of Nature and Culture in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic of Central Anatolia: The Transition of Çatalhöyük East to West

Summary

Prehistoric communities need to be seen as firmly embedded in their ecosystem and landscape where the nature is a very real factor in the decision making processes. The human-environmental relationship is complex and non-linear, which different societies shape it in variable ways. Responses to nature are always of social character made of a number of intertwined explicit and implicit elements. They ultimately have far reaching consequences for the condition of any group including a survival in the face of food shortage or lack of critical resources. The entanglement and nature and culture becomes particularly complex in a period of climate change such as the 8.2k cal BP climatic event. This paper argues that how humans respond to climate change plays a crucial part in the formation of society. Çatalhöyük offers a microcosm that may help us unlock some of the key questions surrounding the period of the transition from the East to West mound around 6,000 cal BC. By revealing the entanglement of nature and culture on a micro-scale, the paper aims to investigate the character of this major threshold in the development of Anatolian societies of that period from a hitherto unexplored perspective.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Exploring Prehistoric Perceptions of "Nature": Can We Go Beyond Economic Human-Environment Interactions?

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16090