Religion, History, and Place in the Origin of Settled Life
Edited by Ian Hodder
University Press of Colorado
"Recent data excavated from the Middle East challenge many of the narratives to which we have become accustomed regarding the origins of agriculture and settled life... The assumed primacy of it's the economy, stupid has been replaced by a singular focus of it all began with ritual."
—From the introduction by Ian Hodder
This book for archeologists explores the role of religion and ritual in the origin of settled life by focusing on the repetitive construction of houses or cult buildings in the same place. Specialists working at Çatalhöyük, Göbekli Tepe, Ası̧klı Höyük and other important sites argue here that the long-term social relationships typical of delayed-returned agricultural systems must be based on historical ties to place and to ancestors.
"If indeed we are to view religion and all practices related to it as the ‘cement’ of a given social group, then it becomes extremely critical to focus on prehistoric ritual indices, in whatever form they are displayed in the archaeological record... Anspach argues that hearths at Ası̧klı can be considered as ritual features, as these are not found in each house; they are built in the same spot over centuries and they are kept conspicuously clean (as opposed to Çatalhöyük hearths). Also there seems to be a correlation between hearths and burials, as they tend to co-appear in the same rooms. All this suggests that the hearth was a ritually installed feature in some Ası̧klı rooms to accompany and commemorate buried individuals... This is a thought-provoking, captivating and well-edited book on history-making practices in Neolithic Anatolia and southwest Asia."
—Çiler Çilingiroğlu in Cambridge Archaeological Journal
"In chapter 7 Anspach presents an intriguing analysis of hearths comparing Çatalhöyük and antecedent Aşıklı Höyük. He suggests these seemingly prosaic features may have had greater ritual significance than usually believed, arguing that specialized ceremonial centers led to more elaborate individual houses... The contributions in this important volume provide valuable new insights into the complexity of Neolithic society."
—Alan Simmons, Journal of Anthropological Research
From chapter 7:
"This chapter presents two separate but interlocking arguments. The first concerns a specific architectural feature: the hearth. I will insist on the vital role hearths have played in ritual and history making. There is an abundance of ethnographic and historical evidence for the importance of the perpetually burning hearth fire as a sacred marker of ancestral attachment to place... For us, hearth and home are synonymous, but at Aşıklı Höyük not every house has a hearth. Indeed, we cannot even be sure that the hearth buildings are houses. In this regard, Aşıklı Höyük differs from Çatalhöyük... If we recognize that hearths, whether domestic or not, originally possessed religious value, then the integration of hearths into all the houses at Çatalhöyük is a corollary of the more general integration of religious symbolism into the houses there.
"But how can we account for this more general phenomenon? Here we come to my second argument, which concerns the role of imitation as a possible explanatory factor in the transition from specialized ceremonial centers to more elaborate individual houses... Raglan [notes] 'the way in which sacredness spreads from the originally sacred building to ordinary houses'... The adoption in domestic buildings of features borrowed from temples or cult buildings is, I argue, a mimetic phenomenon: it is the result of emulation. Özdogan and Özdogan write that most of the cult buildings in Neolithic sites of southeastern Turkey are 'ostentatiously different from all domestic structures'. Turning this formula around, one could add that most of the domestic structures at Çatalhöyük, with its fierce egalitarianism, are ostentatiously the same as cult buildings elsewhere...
"At Ası̧klı, I contend, the ceremonial buildings include not only those hitherto recognized as such—namely, the monumental complex with a large hearth and the parallel 'non-domestic' site nearby at Musular—but also the non-monumental yet arguably non-domestic buildings that contain smaller indoor hearths and sub-floor burials. Then, at Çatalhöyük, all non-domestic ceremonial buildings disappear when both hearths and burials are drawn into the domestic living space as part of a process of emulation that turns every house into a temple. But when every house is a temple, a temple is no longer what it once was. The main reason hearths appear less important to us in their new setting is simply that they have become more commonplace... This is the paradox of imitation: when a model perceived as special is copied on a large scale, it is special no more."
—Mark R. Anspach, "'Every Man's House Was His Temple': Mimetic Dynamics in the Transition from Aşıklı Höyük to Çatalhöyük," Religion, History, and Place in the Origin of Settled Life (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2018), pp. 186-211