| Entry: | A couple of days ago I finished excavating a late burial—probably Roman from the looks of it. It was an unusually deep grave with a wonderfully preserved skeleton at its bottom. As a late burial, it doesn’t hold the same importance among our Neolithic interests here at Çatalhöyük, but it was fascinating nonetheless. If anything, I find the comparisons between the Neolithic burials and these later burials a great point of interest. It is not just about the tightly flexed versus extended poses or the differences in burial goods. The continuities astound me. Even when several thousand years apart, these very different people had similar notions of death and what it meant to grieve and what a deceased human needed. Whether it is the tiny beads we find in children’s burials or the blue glass vessels that seem to be present in many of the recent late burials, the element of goods is there and so is that apparent idea that the dead should not be buried alone.
One other thing that has truck me about my burial is the current speculation that the woman buried in the grave appears to be of African descent. Whether or not this hypothesis remains viable with further study it made me think a lot about the cultural interactions. If she is indeed of African descent she is different than some of the other late burials we have seen and demonstrates a huge scope of cross-cultural interaction. Furthermore, she was buried with many of the same goods--fine vases and personal items like pins--that the other burials were, suggesting a similar status level; probably in the upper echelons. To me, this represents a level of, lets call it worldliness, that the Neolithic burials don’t seem to demonstrate on the surface. ( Although I am largely ignorant about the different burials that have been found, this is purely speculation from what I have so far seen, heard and been exposed to-- the reality could be quite different). Have different possible ethnicities ever been seen represented in the graves of Çatalhöyük? It would seem that you could use burials as a kind of measuring stick of the diversity and scope of (foreign) interaction within a community. Not only can the goods tell you about this diversity but it would appear the individual can as well, even long after they have been placed in the ground with those possessions deemed most necessary in the next phase of life. |
