When our group
arrived at Catal, three women, Afyer, Sharon and
Jo, warmly greeted us. They were to be our "tour
guides" for our day at the dig. Ayfer Bartu,
social anthropologist at the University of
Istanbul, talked enthusiastically about the
Goddess groups that had come to Catal to create
ritual on the mounds. In her role as liason
between the locals and the archaeology team,
Bartu had invited the mayor of the nearest
village to one of the large Goddess ceremonies.
She said he was quite pleased to have been
invited and seemed to enjoy it very much. Sharon
Webb and Jo Sofar, student interns focusing on
museum representations and gender studies,
respectively, were also open, accepting and
enthusiastic, which made for a delightful day at
the dig.
It was fascinating to
learn about the state-of-the-art science that
has inspired the academe of archaeology to hail
this excavation as the "dig of the new
millennium." But it was our conversations with
Ayfer, Sharon and Jo that yielded up the real
excitement and the hope for the future. Sharon's
work was to study the methods by which artifacts
are selected for museum display, and to create a
process for selection that would result in a
more accurate representation of a site. Jo is a
physical anthropologist, and her gender studies
work focuses on the interpretations of a site,
and the role perspective plays. Ayfer described
a project she was planning with the local women
who work at the site. Cameras would be provided
to each of the women, and they would be invited
to photograph whatever interests them at Catal.
Together, they would select and arrange an
exhibit of their photographs in the new onsite
museum. When the museum opened in the fall, this
women's exhibit would be mounted along with the
first exhibition of findings from the recent
excavations, perhaps the first time in history
that local women have had an opportunity to make
a public comment on the archaeological work
being done in their midst.
When I returned to the
states in the fall, I was filled with the
glories of all I had seen and heard about the
Goddess and Her connection to the people of
Anatolia from the Neolithic to the present day.
Filled with hope and a sense of "living
something that's a treasure" (Hiller) as artist
Rose Wognum Frances put it, I had pushed
Hodder's doubts to the back of my mind where
they remained until I picked up the November 20
issue of Science magazine. In an article
reporting on the recent excavations at
Catalhoyuk, I read: "Hodder and other
archaeologists at Catalhoyuk say the evidence to
support [G]oddess worship is scant."
James Mellaart made the
first excavations of Catalhoyuk in the early
'60s. Based on his findings of wall paintings,
sculptures and figurines which are now on
display in the museums, Mellaart declared Catal
a Goddess culture. Ian Hodder reopened the site
in 1993. What
happened, I wondered, in the intervening 30
years to produce this drastic re-interpretation
by the Cambridge-based team of archaeologists?
The first excavation of
Catalhoyuk provided a picture of life in the
early Neolithic that challenged the established
beliefs regarding the origins of civilization
and culture. Mellaart's work revealed a 7th
millenium culture that flourished for over a
1000 years with highly creative art and
well-established trade across the continent and
the Mediterranean. Not a small village, but a
community of up to 10,000 people looked over a
fertile river valley, lush with a diversity of
grains, fruits and other vegetation. Many images
of the abundant, pregnant or birthing Goddess
were found in the form of figurines and wall
paintings. What was not found was something
history textbooks of the '60s (and many that are
unfortunately still in use today), taught was a
necessary element for the development of
"civilization." No images of military pursuits,
no weapons of war, no fortifications were found.
The established ideas about early cultures were
called into question as the Goddess spoke across
9000 years Her message of life abundant -
peaceful and joyous, cyclical and celebratory.
And, as Marija Gimbutas reminds us in The
Civilizations of the Goddess, the culture of
Catalhuyuk did not emerge from a vacuum, nor did
its Goddess.
Twenty thousand years
earlier, people of the Paleolithic carved
figurines such as the abundant Goddess found at
Willendorf, and the Bird Goddess from Africa
with Her mighty arms upraised, the cosmic egg in
Her buttocks. The main themes of Goddess
symbolism &endash; birth, nurturance, death and
renewal &endash; were already in place (Gimbutas
xix) These figures with the pregnant belly and
large nurturing breasts, prefigure the female
images found at Catal. And each of these
Paleolithic figures looks back to Her origins
much farther than we look back to Her. A small
pregnant Goddess found in the Golan Heights area
has been dated to at least 250,000 BP.*
The work of Mellaart and
Gimbutas was mutually supportive, and in turn
supported the work of feminist scholars in other
fields. Gimbutas interpreted the symbols and
imagery of the Great Goddess at archaeological
sites throughout Europe, and made available to
us a wealth of information about the
female-centered cultures of pre-historic times.
The extensive research and thoughtful
interpretations of scholars such as Merlin
Stone, whose Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood
is a rich collection of stories and mythological
references to the Goddess from virtually every
culture for which records exist, provided
evidence for the prehistoric roots of the Divine
Feminine. For many women in the era of the
second wave of feminism, this information was,
indeed, a gift from the Goddess.
Why
was it so important? Because it meant that our
assertion that women were equal to men was not a
new idea challenging age-old traditions.
What we were
learning was that from the earliest times, women
held the power of the divine. What we were
learning was that women's equality was not a new
concept which we must somehow prove. No, women's
equality was, in fact, inherent from the
beginning of humanity; it was something that had
been denied and torn away from us, something we
needed not to invent, but to reclaim!
And as this reclaiming
work began &endash; on a personal level, on a
political level, on a spiritual level &endash;
archaeology provided a rich field that women
thinkers plowed to bring forth hundreds of books
informing and guiding us toward empowerment and
growth. The prehistoric images called to us
across the chasm of time, and women responded.
Many wrote of their own personal journeys toward
wellness and wholeness guided by a connection
with the Goddess. Some made music to praise and
revere Her. Some made art, recreating Her magic
by the act of creating Her image. And many of us
have taken inspiration from this blossoming of
art and information celebrating the Goddess and
Her return to our consciousness.
Mellaart's last season
at Catal was in 1965. By the mid 70s, the early
works of Gimbutas, Starhawk, Stone and others
were inspiring the first celebratory wave of
Goddess-focused creative outpourings. It was
about this same time that a growing trend toward
technology and science rose up as a movement
calling itself the "New Archaeology." Critical
of the speculative, story-telling approach of
archaeologists like Mellaart and Gimbutas, this
"New Archaeology", later renamed
"processualism," took a quantifiable approach to
archaeology. Unfortunately, this purportedly
"scientific eye" often seemed to be wearing
blinders when looking at symbolic imagery,
particularly feminine symbolic imagery.
Within the last ten
years, people like Ian Hodder have come along,
charging that processualists focus too narrowly
on questions that can be addressed
scientifically, such as environmental
adaptation, economy, and trade, neglecting more
subjective concerns such as religious and social
beliefs. In the Science article mentioned
earlier, Hodder said, "Humans adapt to their
environment partly through systems of beliefs or
preconceptions of the world. Culture and mind
contribute something; we don't just respond to
the environment the way animals do."
Hodder's archaeology has
been dubbed "post-processualism," and, like
postmodernists trends in the humanities, it
emphasizes the study of the symbolic and
cognitive life of ancient peoples. It also
argues for the need to welcome differing
interpretations of an archaeological site. These
are good ideas in theory, but Hodder has his own
"preconception of the world," and there is no
place in it for a female deity. Therefore, when
he looks at the symbolic life of the people who
lived at Catal Hoyuk, he sees only what supports
his belief that this culture was male dominated.
Hodder sees no "symbolic significance" for the
many female figurines and statuettes found at
Catal, yet he bases his theory of the
"importance of the male line" on a single burial
of a man who may have been wearing as an amulet
"the deformed penis bone of a small weasel-like
animal" (dialogues). The post-processualists may
be broadening the focus of archaeology, but the
Cambridge team seems to operate from a narrow
patriarchal perspective that does not value the
feminine equally with the masculine.
After 30 years of
silence, the Catalhoyuk mounds are being plumbed
for their secrets once again, Mellaart's
intuition replaced by Hodder's state-of-the-art
science and multi-discipline,
multi-interpretation approach. But the
"differing interpretations" of the team leaders
do not seem to differ much from one another with
respect to interpretations of Goddess imagery.
In a conversation during my visit to the dig in
'98, one of the team directors disdainfully
refuted Gimbutas' interpretation of Bird Goddess
imagery. Another team director has co-authored
an article in which she admires Gimbutas' work
with the exception of her work interpreting the
Goddess cultures (Tringham). In my email
dialogue with Hodder, I asked about one of the
statues found and declared a Goddess by Mellaart
- a woman seated between two leopards, her hands
resting on their necks &endash; Hodder stated
that it "suggests a powerful symbolic role for
women. But beyond this we need a lot more
research" (Catalhoyuk Archaeological Site). Was
Mellaart wrong about Catalhoyuk?
Continue
reading Goddess in Anatolia
//