Temporalities of “religion” at Çatalhöyük

Tür:

Kitap Bölümü

Yazar:

Peter Pels

Yayın yılı:

2010

Yayıncı:

Cambridge University Press

This essay starts from the assumption that the careful distinction of different temporalities indicated by the material evidence from the Çatalhöyük site may advance the study of whatever kind of specially marked “religious” or “transcendent” experiences occupied the life of its inhabitants. In writing it, however, I found that I needed a certain theoretical and methodological framing to make sense of my arguments about how “temporalities of religion” can become useful to analyze the material record of Çatalhöyük. As someone without archaeological experience, I was struck by the extent to which archaeological analysis is suspended between the twin anchors of the material record, on the one hand, and theoretical narratives of the longue durée, on the other. The effort of bringing these together in a process of abduction seems to be the essence of archaeological interpretation. My effort to contribute to this process of abduction in the case of Çatalhöyük, therefore, entails the following steps: First, I try to answer the question of what one may be looking at when looking for different timescales in the material record, and part of this answer is that one inevitably seems to look at facts that ultimately take their meaning from within a narrative of the longue durée. Second, I have to question the relevance of notions of “symbolism” and “religion” when applied to the Neolithic. Third, this effort has to be translated to my own version of the narrative of the longue durée as…

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