Weaving the Fabric of Society at Çatalhöyük: A Socio-Material Network Approach to the Study of Early Agricultural Settled Life, Social Structure and Differentiation

Summary

The end of the Çatalhöyük Research Project’s (ÇRP) 25-year mandate and the consequent generation of large and unique datasets produced by the collaboration of excavators and the specialists labs provide an extraordinary opportunity to investigate patterns of early agricultural settled life, social structure and differentiation at an intra-site level through a synthetic approach capable of weaving together different data threads. In this study, a relational framework rooted in models of socio-material interdependencies is used to link the various ÇRP datasets (e.g. architecture, pottery, botanical remains, chipped and ground stone) and produce complex formal network models. Relational approaches are built on the observation that, instead of focusing on entities in isolation, analyzing the connections or the set of relations between them provides a much deeper understanding of the dynamics of social phenomena and in recent years have been increasingly recognized as a valuable methodological framework for investigating social linkages at Neolithic Çatalhöyük. Socio-material archaeological networks are used here as a way of mapping the cross-cutting and overlapping set of "flexible networks" that form the site’s social fabric. This methodology provides a way of elucidating social dynamics both synchronically and diachronically.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Continuity and Change, Two Decades of Excavation and Research at Çatalhöyük

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15267