[Digging up Turkey’s past] Totally stone age: James Mellaart at Çatalhöyük

Earlier that year John F. Kennedy had been sworn in as US president. Soon after, with the Cold War at its height, the Soviets successfully launched a chimpanzee, Ham the Astrochimp, into outer space. The communists topped that in April when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, sending ripples of fear through a paranoid American public. A few days later the US suffered humiliation at the Bay of Pigs, bungling its attempt to topple Cuba’s Fidel Castro. The month Mellaart arrived at Çatalhöyük the sounds of Del Shannon’s catchy rock and roll chart-topper “My Little Runaway” pumped out of transistor radios across the free world. I don’t know how interested Mellaart was in the presidential elections, the space race or rock and roll, nor indeed by the most memorable events in circa 1961 Turkey -- the unveiling of a new, post-coup constitution and the nationalism-inspired techno-wizardry of Devrim, Turkey’s very first home-grown automobile. What is certain, though, is that what he uncovered at Çatalhöyük made a several millennia-old “artificial” hill in southwest Anatolia into an archaeological textbook site -- and caught the imagination of people across the globe.

Catal Huyuk: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia,” by James Mellaart, “The Goddess and the Bull” by Michael Balter

Filthy Roman muck

Çatalhöyük is a settlement mound or tel, an artificial hill formed layer upon layer as successive mud-brick settlements were leveled, usually every 100 years or so, and built anew on the rubble. Mellaart first visited the site in 1958, looking for new prehistoric sites to dig in Anatolia. What excited him most about Çatalhöyük was that whilst other sites were usually overlain with much later Bronze Age, Greek, Roman and Medieval remains, at Çatalhöyük all the occupation layers in the mound appeared to be Neolithic, or New Stone Age (roughly speaking, 9,500-4,500 B.C.). Prehistory was Mellaart’s passion. So much so that the Roman-era sites that excite so many visitors to Turkey today were simply F.R.M., the acronym he used in his journal for the self-coined phrase “filthy Roman muck.” Here was an “uncontaminated” prehistoric site, and the ambitious Mellaart was determined to excavate it. First, however, he had to complete his current project, at the later-period site of Hacılar, near Burdur in Turkey’s Lake District.

An archaeologist is born

Mellaart’s unusual background helped imbue him with the requisite qualities to become a leading archaeologist. He was born in London in 1925 to a Dutch immigrant father and Northern Irish mother. An art expert, Mellaart’s father advised dealers and collectors on their purchases. In 1932 the family were forced to move to Holland following a downturn in the art market. Then his mother died, and the young Mellaart trailed from town to town in his father’s unsettled wake. Even worse, aged 15, Mellaart was called up to serve in the labor battalions of the occupying Nazis. His father then made a decision that was to prove the turning point in his son’s life, and sent him “underground” to work in the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden. Surrounded by archaeological finds from around the world Mellaart became hooked on all things ancient. In 1947 he became a student of archaeology at the University College of London, graduating in 1951.

Lucky in love

Mellaart then successfully applied for a research grant from the newly formed British Institute of Archaeology, based in Ankara. Over the next two years he tramped on foot over vast swathes of southern Anatolia, uncovering hundreds of previously unknown sites and collecting thousands of potshards (bits of broken pottery). Mellaart was eventually to find something more intoxicating than pottery fragments in Anatolia -- love. In 1954, whilst visiting a dig at Fikirtepe near İstanbul, he met Arlette Cenani who was working diligently on the site. She came from a wealthy İstanbul family, and many of her ancestors had held high positions in the Ottoman era. The pair married in 1954, and when not excavating (which they invariably did together) lived in the family’s wooden yalı (Bosporus-front mansion). Lucky in love, Mellaart had also more than proved his worth in archaeological terms with the discovery of several more important sites in Turkey in the mid ‘50s, and in 1958 he was appointed assistant director of the British Institute of Archaeology.

James Mellaart theorized that Çatalhöyük may have been a matriarchal society, based on the evidence that he turned up many small statues of mother-goddesses.

The world’s first city?

Mellaart’s excavations at Çatalhöyük began on May 17, 1961. In the team were 35 workmen he had used on a previous dig, an artist, an architect, a Turkish archaeology student, an expert on the stone tools which defined the Stone Age and, of course, Arlette. Over the next few seasons Mellaart and his team excavated what, at the time at least, could be described as the world’s first city. For here, so-called primitive man, who had only recently made the transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer to a settled society, had once lived in a settlement up to 8,000 strong. The excavators, under Mellaart’s chain-smoking direction, eventually painstakingly unearthed around 200 flat-roofed, mud-brick houses, so densely packed together there was no room for alleys, let alone streets, and the inhabitants almost certainly entered their homes via holes in the roof. Mellaart’s excitement knew no bounds when he discovered a section of wall plaster decorated with a scene of hunters in pursuit of deer -- the first such painting discovered on a manmade (as opposed, say, to a cave wall) surface. Preserving friable finds like this was a major headache for Mellaart. He called in an expert on Byzantine frescoes, which resulted in the delicate fragments of painted plaster being treated with resin and cut from the walls before being sent to Ankara for safekeeping. Preventing the whole site from reverting to the mud from which it was built over the rainy winter close season was equally challenging.

Still, work continued, and more and more exciting details of the settlement and the way of life of its inhabitants were revealed as the excavation progressed. Mellaart used the two excavation methods of the time, in places carefully exposing sections of the mound layer by layer; in other areas, to get quicker results, he cut vertical trenches straight through several layers of occupation. The houses he uncovered were all built to more or less the same, flat-roofed, rectangular design. Inside each was a dome-shaped clay oven, positioned underneath the same roof hole he assumed was the door. Benches lined the walls, under which the diggers began to find skeleton after skeleton. The bodies had clearly been ceremoniously buried there, males often with weapons such as stone axes and knives made of obsidian -- a hard, glass-like black volcanic rock very useful to early man as it could be chipped to a razor-sharp edge. The women, on the other hand, were buried with adornments such as shell and bead necklaces and, remarkably, mirrors made from obsidian. In fact, Mellaart theorized that Çatalhöyük may have been a matriarchal society, based on the evidence that although he turned up many small statues of mother-goddesses (best seen at Ankara’s Museum of Anatolian Civilizations) and other female figures, there were no male counterparts.

A Neolithic town in Anatolia

At Çatalhöyük Mellaart proved what previous archaeologists had doubted -- that Anatolia was an important region in the development of Neolithic man. More importantly, he had shown that out on the Konya plain, man, around 7,500 B.C., had banded together to produce something which was remarkably akin to a modern city. Recent archaeological discoveries suggest that there were earlier and larger urban settlements than Çatalhöyük, but at the time Mellaart was digging, only Jericho (which Mellaart had also worked on) could lay claim to being an older “city,” though it was only a tenth the size of its Anatolian rival. A brilliant and dedicated archaeologist, Mellaart’s successes at Çatalhöyük ensured him both academic and public acclaim, and his 1967 book, “Catal Huyuk: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia,” was an instant classic. Unfortunately for Mellaart, a curious incident dating back to his pre-Çatalhöyük days was to come back to haunt him: the mysterious Dorak affair.

The mysterious Dorak affair

Sources, especially the testimony of Mellaart himself, conflict on the Dorak affair, but the general outline is as follows. In 1958, traveling to İzmir to check out some antiquities in the museum there, Mellaart met an attractive young woman on the train, Anna Papastrati. She claimed to have some important antiquities in her İzmir home that she wished to show him. Skeptical, Mellaart accompanied Anna to an İzmir suburb, where after a meal and a bottle of wine she showed him a startling array of (mainly Bronze Age) treasures including swords, gold bracelets, silver figurines and a whole host of other valuable artifacts. A stunned Mellaart was allowed to sketch, but not photograph, the antiquities which, he was told, had come from a series of graves unearthed during the Greek invasion of Anatolia in the early 1920s. Mellaart was sworn to secrecy, but eventually Anna gave him permission (by letter, he never saw her again, if indeed she wasn’t just a figment of his imagination) to publish the drawings. Before long they appeared, to great fanfare, in the Illustrated London News. The Turkish authorities were incensed; why hadn’t Mellaart alerted them to what was clearly an illegally looted ancient treasure horde?

A tarnished reputation

Attempts to trace either Anna Papastrati or the treasures failed, and Mellaart’s reputation suffered further damage when some valuable items from Hacılar turned up on the international art market. His permit for Çatalhöyük was not renewed for the 1964 season. He did return to his beloved site in 1965, though not as director, but when some figurines from the mound appeared in a Konya antique shop, the writing was on the wall for Mellaart. Later Mellaart wrote a report for a dig sponsor criticizing what he termed the xenophobic Turkish authorities, Turkish “spies” at the dig and the Cyprus situation for the difficulties he was facing in Turkey. His indiscrete words were picked up and sensationalized by the Turkish press. The British Institute in Ankara, fearing its own name would be blackened by the scandal, withdrew financial support for Mellaart, and he was forced to concentrate on his lecturing post in London. In a further stroke of bad luck, Arlette’s family yalı in Kanlıca burnt to the ground in 1976.

Despite the lingering questions, Mellaart’s contribution to Anatolian archaeology cannot be doubted. Today, through an ongoing project involving a multinational team of archaeologists led by Ian Hodder and supported by corporate sponsors such as Koç and Shell, Çatalhöyük is Turkey’s most accessible prehistoric site.

Further reading: “The Goddess and the Bull” by Michael Balter; “The Leopard’s Tale” by Ian Hodder.