Road Stops, Neolithic Sites, and Cultural Continuity

Just a short entry to log some of the smaller things on the trip.

We ate lunch at a Turkish roadside stop. In America, roadside stops are McDonald's and Roy Rogers; in Turkey, it's local pide (which is like a Turkish pizza), tablecloths, lentils, and pita itself. No meals have been bad.

Catal Hoyuk was another great stop. Catal Hoyuk is a Neolithic site dating to 6,000 B.C. It predates metal and stone use. The people there built houses out of mud-brick and huddled them next to each other, creating a city of sorts. Their entrances were from the top. I had a lot of jumbled observations about this place. The first observation is how mysterious pre-historical sites are. We don't know so much, and so our observations almost say as much about us as they do about the people who dwelled there.

With the advent of civilization, classes emerged. In fact, we date Catal Hoyuk as one of the first cities because it has differentiated buildings, such as a temple, and the indications of a priest class and a law-maker class. Does that mean that Marxism is essentially an attempt to return to Paleolithic non-civilization? If our definition is so tied up with classes and differentiation and specialization, is there something fundamental about classes that demands that we must have them if we are to remain a coherent civilization? Is Marxism a reaction, not against the ills of civilization, but against civilization itself? Does that include any returns to a pagan sort of religion? Or the desctruction of abstract concepts?

What are you supposed to do when you face the sheer wall of humanity? When you collide with 8,000 years of history in a culture not your own? These people ate and worshipped, much like we do. Archeology is educated guesswork. The goal is the inference to the best explanation at taht time. If I gained nothing else from the trip, that would be enough, because I am now equipped to approach publications and archeological findings with a healthy dose of skepticism. I will question--but not only doubt--the signs and the accpted theories and explanations.

There are 500 mounds like Catal Hoyuk on the Konya plan, and less than 10% have been excavated. What will we discover in the next 50 years that will revolutionize our understanding of these neolithic cultures?

The last thing I want to comment on in this post is the concept of cultural continuity. The ancient Hittites deified their kings in the late Bronze Age, as we could see from the conical caps they wore (a symbol of godhood). During the Greek and Hellenistic period, the Anatolian peoples constructed stuctures called Heroon, buildings which resembled temples, that honored a hero of a particular area. Fast forward to the Christian era, and there are icons of the Saints all over the Greek Orthodox church. There are two possible causes for these similarities. In one theory, humankind thinks is a similar fashion, and so they do things simlilarly, whether they were influenced by each other or not. In the other theory, cultural continuity stems from the influence of the previous culture. It is hard to draw strong conclusions from individual cases, such as those I mentioned above, but it is uncanny that they follow each other. It seems a hard sell to me that these cultures did not influence each other, though I suppose there is no way to prove causation.