In this chapter I set the efforts that we have taken to give the BACH Project a public face within the context of some of the work of the Çatalhöyük Research Project, which itself is set in the broader enterprise of cultural heritage and public archaeology. I start with a discussion on the nature of Public Archaeology and Cultural Heritage.

In this chapter I identify more with a practice-based discourse of heritage rather than what LauraJane Smith has referred to quite critically in her book The Uses of Heritage  as the hegemony of the traditional heritage discourse based on a common-sense identification of  “heritage as ‘old’, monumental, grand, and aesthetically pleasing sites, buildings, places and artifacts”. Smith’s argument is that heritage is about much more than objects and sites and landscapes, although these play a role in creating the contexts of practice; it is about the cultural and social processes and performances of management, conservation/preservation, interpretation, and commemoration.

I continue with a discussion on the relationship between the sustainability and the longevity of heritage. I conclude that to achieve sustainable longevity, a heritage place needs to be designed, managed and presented with the possibility of flexibility in meeting the challenge of changing social and cultural trends, values, and practices. Longevity is not achieved by irreversibly preserving a place or a tradition, or locking it away in a museum or digital vault, but by bringing the idea and its tangible, intangible, and/or digital manifestation into everyday practice, so that the place or the digital document can be accessed, visited, used, and built upon (metaphorically) by many generations in the future.

We are always reminded that archaeological excavation is a form of destruction of heritage, although ironically its aim is to create knowledge about the past. Archaeology’s current format of documentation is predominantly digital. Thus the cleansing of digital servers and drives may seem less political than the destruction of tangible or intangible heritage, but it can result in equally devastating destruction of past heritage and knowledge. This leads me into a discussion of how digital documentation leads in good practices of sustainability for the long-term.

I then pose the question what are the implications of these sustainability issues of heritage and its digital documentation for the public presentation of heritage? The response is a discussion about the multiplicity of publics/communities and the varying “affects” that heritage performance and communication has on them. Each person creates meaning out of what they see and hear depending on their lives, knowledge base, and experiences at the time. Thus, the audience is not a group entity passively waiting to be filled with information. Guidance and scaffolding will better encourage active participation and sustained use by users and visitors, than structured information transmission.

This conclusion leads into the important point for the BACH project that innovative strategies based on the creative uses of digital technology and on less fixed, less tangible manifestations of heritage interpretation become highly attractive. Digitally based and event-based presentations are seductive and engaging – they are also powerful ways of reaching many publics - but they are ephemeral social practices, and their meaning and engagement may not last. This puts a certain responsibility on the designers and managers of heritage places to be aware of emerging formats and interests and to maintain the heritage place as a focus of their attention, rather than to think of their design as a finite project to be completed and moved on from.

In fact the maintenance of a heritage place is not only the responsibility of the designers and managers of heritage. Remembering, commemorating, and forgetting the past is an active cultural – and political – process. The idea of all heritage being “intangible” forefronts the role of memory, stories, experience and ‘affect’ of social practice in places, creating a large intellectual space for heritage visitors and practitioners to participate in the construction of history through the creation of multiple and multivocal narratives that provide a healthy contrast to a single set of facts received by ‘consensual agreement’ from the authoritative story of the past.

I come at last to Çatalhöyük as a Heritage Site and discuss a number of past and ongoing issues and public archaeology projects (including TEMPER) at the site. Among these is a discussion started by Louise Doughty and Ian Hodder on the challenges of engaging the public with prehistoric sites especially those without surface architecture , and the entangled nature of the many publics interested in Çatalhöyük as pointed out by social anthropologists Ayfer Bartu-Candan and David Shankland. In this chapter I draw attention to the broader definition of "public" as including both on-site as well as on-line communities and the large and varied population that makes up the ever-changing Çatalhöyük project team.

The sections that follow describe the ways in which communication about the Çatalhöyük Research Project, especially the BACH project, are implemented:

•On-site Installations: the idea of Excavation as live performance, Demonstration Houses in which excavation is frozen to show architectural features in situ, The Visitor Center, The Replica Neolithic House created by Mirjana Stevanović. In this section I also describe The Compound where the team members live and work which impacts the visitor experience by their exclusion from it. On-site Self-guided Tours, Display panels, Audio Guide, and the Video-Walks of the Remediated Places Project are other on-site installations. Finally Press Day is the dramatic annual performative event for the complete team and the public.

•Off-site Performance includes presentations about the to public and/or professional audiences, as well as live performances and museum exhibits.

•Media Popularization and Popular Culture representation of  Çatalhöyük includes a discussion on the differing popular impact of the two periods of research. I review four popular books that represent the impact of the new excavations.

•On-line Sharing: a discussion of Çatalhöyük’s digital heritage in relation to the transformation of the Internet during the project's history, including Conventional (Web 1.0) websites and portals, and the more recent democratization of technology provided by the public participation and professional networking of Web 2.0. This section also includes the important issue of sharing digital databases with the public. The impact of licensing the Çatalhöyük data with Creative Commons ‘some rights reserved’ is to ensure greater usability of the project's data, thus encouraging its greater sustainability and longevity The BACH's contributions to the outerfacing of the Çatalhöyük and BACH Databases receives a long discussion at this point.

The final section of the paper concerns Çatalhöyük and the use of the project on-site facilities and on-line data as resources for learning about archaeology and the process by which we construct the prehistoric past of Turkey both within and outside Turkey.

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Preface

Introduction

Chapters

Preface

Introduction

Chapters

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