Understanding Ritual Events within the Architectural Context of Building on a Cumulative Construct: The Case of the Çatalhöyük East Mound

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Looking at closure, abandonment and subsequent foundation events as interlinked and sometimes overlapping actions, opens the door to questioning rituals and ‘rules,’ and asking whether ritual emerges from practice or hovers above daily pragmatism. The Çatalhöyük East Mound (7100-5950 BCE), a deeply cumulative settlement in Central Anatolia, with uninterrupted Neolithic occupation, presents an ideal laboratory for understanding such processes and how they change over time. While at first glance Çatalhöyük seems to present strict rules regarding the building of successions of houses, a closer look at its elaborately documented archive may provide a different picture, especially considering the pragmatic realities of building upon an unevenly subsiding accumulation of settlement layers. In other words, looking at the minutiae of such processes reveals the dynamics between abstract (in this case socio-ritual) and material forces that have continuously produced and modified both the mound and its people. This perpetual state of reciprocal and emergent ‘becoming’ grounds the theoretical approach with which this paper aims to explore continuity, change, adaptation and resilience. The periodic abandonment of buildings and the practices surrounding these actions provide the perfect case study for exploring this process of ‘becoming,’ against ongoing discussions of what constitutes ritual.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51422