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Chapter 8 - Çatalhöyük East and Köşk Höyük

A Grand Connection?

from Part II - Anatolia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2022

By
Bleda S. Düring
Edited by
Peter F. Biehl  and
Eva Rosenstock
Peter F. Biehl
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
Eva Rosenstock
Affiliation:
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
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Summary

Grand narratives have proven remarkably persistent in the archaeology of the Near East despite the success of postmodern paradigms in archaeology. After presenting various examples of such grand narratives, this chapter will focus on the “grand connection” postulated in recent years between Çatalhöyük East and Köşk Höyük. Köşk Höyük, with its rich imagery and plastered skulls, has often been presented as the cultural descendant of Çatalhöyük East, continuing the same symbolic worlds that dominated in the Neolithic. In this chapter, this view will be problematized. Apart from the obvious problem that the Çatalhöyük East sequence is now known to continue with that of Çatalhöyuk West, which has assemblages that are completely different from those of Köşk Höyük/Tepecik, there are very clear differences between the Çatalhöyük East images and burial traditions and those of Köşk Höyük. Some of the marked differences that set these sites apart will be highlighted and these may help us to make sense of what happened in Asia Minor at the transition from the 7th to the 6th millennium cal BC.

Keywords

Grand narrativeSkull cultArtCosmology
Type
Chapter
Information
6000 BC
Transformation and Change in the Near East and Europe
 , pp. 125 - 135
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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