Recently I have been inspired to step back from my experience as director of the BACH project to think about how we create and experience this place at the two mounds of Çatalhöyük that dominates our attention for months and years, that draws us many thousands of miles for repeated visits. It seems to me that the concept of rhythms and repeated practices creates an anchor (albeit a fluid one) to which can be tied the construction and multisensorial experience of place by the multiple actors of the present and the past at Çatalhöyük.

In this chapter, I explore this path focusing first on the rhythms of practice in the ‘now’ of the everyday experience of being in the Çatalhöyük Research Project. Before proceeding to look through this window into the past rhythms and sensing of place, I take a step backwards to consider the theoretical foundations and implications of creating such a window, focusing on the idea of taskscapes, embodiment and choreographies of movement, patterns of repeated practices, and the construction of place. Then I embark on a tentative and fragmentary exploration of the multisensorial experiences at Çatalhöyük 9000 years ago and the construction of what would certainly have been very different and unfamiliar places for us modern archaeologists. For this enterprise I anchor myself with the empirical archaeological data especially the identification of events in the depositional history of the site.

I then bring together the ‘then’ and the ‘now’ in a discussion of the multisensorial experience, focusing on each of the five senses in turn. Finally, as a bridge from this final chapter of the printed monograph to its digital ‘mirror’, I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of sharing the multisensorial experience and construction of the places at Çatalhöyük using digital technology. As archaeologists when engaged in this exercise we tend, by pressure from the material remains of the past, to forefront kinesthetic practice, the human body engaged with itself or other materials in a task that has some intentioned product and/or purpose. Following Ingold’s (2000) discussion of taskscapes as social practice, it seems to me that the task itself is but a fragment of the event of social action that was taking place. The problem is how to select, simplify and merge taskscapes without creating a generic series of repetitive practices that lose sight of the amazing richness of everyday life in Neolithic Çatalhöyük. In response, I follow the non-linear, ephemeral, and fragmentary nature of memory and the construction of history in building a web of related fragments of thoughts about and interpretations of archaeological data that are predominantly built from observations in the BACH Area, but also roam across the entire East Mound.

I bring together the ‘then’ and the ‘now’ in a discussion of the multisensorial experience, focusing on each of the five senses in turn. As I do this I am very aware of the historic, geographic, cultural,  and even personal contingency of such experience and the personal filter of my imagination. To focus the enormity of the multisensorial study of Çatalhöyük, I have taken Ian Hodder's remark in the The Leopard’s Tale (2006) that whole of Çatalhöyük seems to be about hiding and revealing as a starting point to explore the idea two sides of revealing and hiding - on the one side, secrecy, control, privacy and, on the other, the excitement engendered by discovery, exposure and surprise - by applying it to senses beyond vision, to hiding and revealing sounds, textures, smells and even tastes.

Finally, as a bridge from this final chapter of the printed monograph to its digital ‘mirror’, I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of sharing the multisensorial experience and construction of the places at Çatalhöyük using digital technology. The brings me into a critical discussion of hyperreality and surreality as ways in which digital technology is able to immerse a person in apparent sensorial experience. I discuss 3-D visualizations, virtual worlds, and some of the latest developments in immersive technologies to share the touch and even smell sensations. I argue, however, that digital technologies do have the potential to share a multisensorial experience of place more subtly than print media, for example, in their ability to express the complex interweaving of multiple lines of evidence, multiple scales of interpretation, the ambiguity of meaning for multiple voices, with alternative scenarios, and – most importantly – to make these processes transparent and thus more engaging. What we shall show in the on-line version of this monograph (The Last House on the Hill) is that it is possible to share the multisensorial senses of place at Çatalhöyük both Then and Now without the engagement of complex expensive technology or even black boxes of mystified knowledge. In creating the online version, we maintain – as when teaching courses that involve the practice and use of digital technologies - that the strength of the message is in its content. This does not mean, however, that I will not be ready to embrace the means to create music out of the haptic experience of trowelling prehistory, given the chance.

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Preface

Introduction

Chapters

Preface

Introduction

Chapters

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