A Great Day in the Field

From the shallow depths of a cigar box, previously unknown photos of Çatalhöyük being excavated by James Mellaart have seen the light of day. Çatalhöyük, one of the largest Neolithic settlements of urban proportions in the world, and occupied around 7400–6000 BC, was excavated by Mellaart from 1961–1965. The photos were taken by Hans Helbæk on one of his visits to the site in Turkey in 1962 or 1963, and are kept in the collections of the National Museum of Denmark, where they were spotted by the author while she was looking for something else entirely.

The archaeobotanist Hans Helbæk shot to fame in 1955 as the first scholar to identify early farming communities directly from charred plant remains at the excavations of Neolithic Jarmo in Iraq, directed by Robert Braidwood. Like Braidwood, Mellaart was quick to appreciate the huge scientific potential in bringing a variety of specialists — zoologists, geologists, botanists — into the field, and to use their skills when interpreting the archaeological record. Helbæk and Mellaart also became great personal friends.

The photo shows Mellaart in front of one of the many wall reliefs on the site, this one featuring a row of female breasts. Imaginative enough on its own, the builders of Çatalhöyük chose to model the breasts — invariably placed on the east wall of houses — in mud plaster over the skulls of foxes, vultures, or weasels, or over the lower jaws of boars. This has been interpreted variously as a symbol of the juxtaposition of life and death, of the association of women with wilderness and danger, and of the capability of women to turn death (as in, the flesh of dead animals) into life (as in, milk and babies). We’ll leave it there and just note that Mellaart and Helbæk probably had a great day in the field.

Mette Marie Hald

Department of Environmental Archaeology and Materials Science, The National Museum of Denmark