The Mother Goddess and the Controversy at Çatalhöyük

I support the sacred feminine as much as any good ol’ lesbian daughter of a Women’s Studies professor, so I was intrigued to come across a story about an ancient “Mother Goddess” figure, possible proof of an ancient matriarchy, discovered in one of the earliest human settlements. Then, it turned out the mother part and the goddess part were controversial, based on specious conclusions drawn from limited evidence. Later archaeological digs suggested different possibilities, leading to hurt feelings and vigorous debate. I must warn you that this story quickly blew up like a balloon, like an energy monster that grows bigger, the more you shoot at it. I will have to contain myself to contain this dramatic story.

Here is the stripped-down version: A goddess figurine discovered in a 1960s archaeological dig in Turkey generated a great deal of excitement, contributing to a rise in interest in goddess feminism. Unfortunately, the original archaeologist turned out to be–how shall I put this–sloppy. His successor, postmodern and more meticulous in his excavation work, suggested this was no goddess, which really pissed off the people coming to worship goddess feminism at the site. However, even newer science may save the day for all concerned!

Although this is a juicy tale of ancient history, archaeology, gender politics, science, and trends in academia, I will try to take the time to be brief.

Çatalhöyük: Walking on the Roof

In 1958, it was just a mound. A lump of a hill that the Turkish locals said was too wild and too remote for any settlement. Archaeologists were already, by then, sniffing around the Fertile Crescent and had already unearthed major ancient cities across Mesopotamia. But what young professor James Mellaart intuited was that there was something under that rise off the Konyan plain. Given permission to dig, he assembled a team with David French and Alan Hall, and they quickly found a multi-level town that had likely housed thousands.

Çatalhöyük is in mid-southwestern Turkey near the Taurus Mountains and the modern city of Konya. It dates back to between 7500 and 5500 B.C.E. Nine thousand years.

Mellaart and team found room after room, thirteen layers of habitation in all, living spaces approached from above Some had windows, although how and where is conjecture. There were trash heaps and numerous burial sites, both nearby and sometimes in the floors–gold mines for archeologists. Murals, grave objects, skeletons, ashes, and bits of garbage revealed a flourishing large society, a kind of link in time and culture between the Neolithic cave dwellers/hunter-gatherers and the sprawling urban centers that would later emerge across the Fertile Crescent.

Among the things unearthed was a seven-inch statue of a large, seated woman. Her head was missing, but the breasts and absence of a male member marked her as female. Mellaart considered her a fertility symbol, a depiction of a woman giving birth and divine. She is clearly royalty, flanked by two feline statues–leopards? lionesses? Her head and that of the left animal were missing, added back in the 1960s, but the restoration was consistent with other figurines of women seated and flanked by animals common to the times. Mellaart labeled her the “Mother Goddess of Çatalhöyük,” and goddess feminism would never be the same.

Influential writers from the 1970s and 1980s, such as Anne Barstow and Marija Gimbutas, referenced the figurine in their groundbreaking feminist studies of ancient times. It was one of the first discoveries that suggested societies were not always patriarchal, not always hierarchical with men in the top spot. Mellaart, an established scholar (and a white male archaeologist) had asserted with conviction that what he found suggested women were the dominant, priestess class. That Çatalhöyük was peaceful, devoted to the nourishment of life, and matriarchal.

There was only one problem. James Mellaart turned out to be a bit of a liar.

“Man who changed history.” “Modern hero.” Banned by the Turkish government. “…the sky fell in.” “I had no time for fools.” “My first reaction was incredulity, but the second was resentment over apparently irregular field work.” “As the news of Mellaart’s falsification became public, several eyewitnesses came forward confirming our findings.” “Pioneer…and forger.”

Quotes from articles about Mellaart by scholars, some who were close friends.

James Mellaart: Genius or Charlatan?

Archaeologist James Mellaart deserves his own post and probably a book about his brilliance and shortcomings. He contributed more than sixty years of scholarship to the discovery of Neolithic civilizations and was the driving force behind multiple finds that generated fascinating information about the earliest human societies. The problem, as best as I can read it, is that he also made things up.

There is no doubt that Mellaart saw something in the Turkish plains that no one had explored, that he discovered Çatalhöyük as well as other locations, and that the seated woman figurine was part of his discovery. But Mellaart became involved in at least three other controversies that cast aspersions on his discoveries. For example, the Beykoy texts, which Mellaart told his son were the most valuable part of his estate, were supposedly originally Akkadian cuneiform and Hittite documents that he had seen and translated into 500 pages of text. Mellaart left his translation for his family to find, but the originals were never seen. When an expert examined the draft pages, he suspected them to be fake. A colleague later found hidden drafts concealed among the papers and exposed the fake in a detailed article.

In another instance, Mellaart and two other authors published a lengthy 1989 book with hundreds of mural drawings from Çatalhöyük, which does have numerous murals. The book claimed that these Çatalhöyük murals were the precursors to Turkish traditional rug designs called kilims. When kilim expert Maria Mallart questioned Mellaart and examined his evidence, she found that little photographic or dates on the drawings, little to link them to the site. It was like a missing chain of custody. Mellaart gave her multiple excuses about why photos were lost and so forth, but she (and others) concluded with dismay that Mellaart invented them. The most charitable thing to say is that Mellaart possibly “filled in” missing blanks between the few that existed and some he remembered. Yet the more scholars dug, the more there were blanks rather than original material.

Lastly, there was the Dorak Affair. Mellaart claimed back in the early 1960s that he met a woman on a train (!!!!) with a curious armband that Mellaart suspected came from a culture near ancient Troy. He claimed she said they came from a family collection, went to her house, where he made several drawings of the objects. After some time, she sent a letter giving him permission to publish the drawings, which he did. Turkish media and authorities believed that the items–never seen or photographed–were appearing for sale elsewhere. The address Mellaart remembered and attached the permission letter led to a dead end, a commercial warehouse. One of two things seemed clear. Either (a) items had been smuggled out by Mellaart for illegal sale or (b) Mellaart fabricated it all.

As a result of the Dorak affair, the Turkish government shut down Mellaart’s Çatalhöyük dig, four years after it started. Mellaart brushed the accusations aside and continued to publish work. Significant interest in goddess feminism and the Mother Goddess continued.

Çatalhöyük remained closed for thirty years.

Ian Hodder: Postprocessualism

When Cambridge-educated archaeologist Ian Hodder persuaded Turkey to re-open the site in 1993, he approached it with a new model. Postmodernism was in full swing, which meant all academic assumptions were questioned: hierarchical models, historical documents, the concepts of superiority or natural anything when it came to race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. The Sixties had been the time of New Archaeology, one relying on science and method, but a new form called postprocessualism said that the archaeologist must recognize their own bias. After all, Mellaart had been more intuitive than methodical.

The one thing Hodder and team brought was method, slow, painstaking method. They recorded their finds and their thoughts about the finds in journals. They expanded the area, but were cautious about conclusions and findings. They also invited input from the broader community, both the local Turkish people and the visitors, the numerous goddess seekers who wanted to feel the spirit of the Mother Goddess. It was the opposite of intuition and “belief,” as far as you could get from the Mellaart school of persuasion by bluster. But Hodder’s results for Çatalhöyük also told a different story.

Hodder argued that the site did not represent a matriarchal society and that the figurines were not mother goddesses. His team found both male and female figurines and murals and he believed the evidence showed that the society treated people equally. If people had equal social status, there went the priestess class and the matriarchy. He also noted that while the seated figure was large, she could not be assumed to be pregnant.

(As a large woman myself, I have to agree. A large stomach does not always indicate pregnancy, especially if the entire body is large. And while there were birthing chairs, the seated woman is not on one. And you ain’t going to be birthin’ no babies while you’re holding on to the heads of leopards, for crying out loud!)

So the Mother Goddess became a Seated Woman, and other figurines were simply artistic depictions of women. As the excavations broadened, the goddess feminists–those who had read Barstow, Gimbutas and others–began making pilgrimages to the site. Hodder’s team provided a space where they could express their thoughts, as all ideas were welcomed. They were frustrated and angry that the somewhat-long held notion that women had been in charge was being removed. Even if the person who had originally expressed the goddess idea was a straight white British male known to be a consummate liar and the person now ruining the party was another straight white British male who tried to listen to all voices and gained consensus.

Kathryn Rountree, a professor of anthropology from New Zealand, an expert on paganism, feminine goddesses, and ancient history, summarized the interaction between Hodder and others as an “exercise in multivocality.” When she talked with Hodder, she was surprised that while he denied the existence of a Goddess among the findings, he supported the notion of a “powerful female deity.” Rountree wondered whether part of the issue was semantics. Hodder also insisted he did not want to weigh in on the presence of a “feminine spiritual presence,” in the same way that scientist should not try to support the factual presence of Buddha or a Christian spirit in those shrines. He was perfectly fine if others felt that presence.

Still there was no matriarchy, no priestess class, according to Hodder, whose 25-year-dig not only surfaced a ton of cleanly documented artwork and material culture but also allowed for a smooth hand-off in 2018 to other archaeologists who continue to look for treasures. Very recently, they may have found a different kind of evidence to restore the harmony of the goddess.

Sequencing the Matriarchy

The key, according to a publication in this summer’s Science magazine, is DNA. Paleogenomic evidence. Similar studies on populations in Neolithic Western Europe showed that communities were patrilinear and patriarchal, meaning that families were male-dominated and that sons inherited households, while women moved.

Çatalhöyük showed the opposite; Çatalhöyük was matrilinear. What Yuncu and others found was that the females buried were related along the mother’s lines. The men apparently moved into households from other genetic lines, the opposite of what you would see in patrilinear households. It didn’t necessarily mean women ruled (matriarchy) but scholars suggest they “point toward’s women’s autonomy and power” in Çatalhöyük. “Seventy to a hundred percent of the time, female offspring remained connected to buildings.”

Burial goods added to the picture. Females received more grave goods than males. Girls were buried with five times more artifacts than boys. Overall, the social architecture suggested that female lineages were the “building blocks of Neolithic Anatolia.”

As an aside, it’s a fascinating story about the history of archaeology itself. Digging gets its own history: excavations begin as a discipline in the 19th century; scientific method in the Sixties; postmodern processes in the Nineties; now DNA remaining on skeletons and trash heaps to connect dots. What ever might come next?

Meanwhile, back to the goddess. Maybe she wasn’t ever a Mother. Maybe that “fertility” stuff had been assumed by (white male) archaeologists, who saw all women as representing the main thing that women (to some) are good for. Another figurine unearthed by Hodder’s team starts to tell a different story. She’s large but not pregnant. We can’t tell her age, but we can tell that she sits in judgment, with arms folded. Perhaps, as the preface to the articles in Science proposes, these are “senior women embodying considerable power.”

Maybe it was never a Mother Goddess, but an Empress, a Queen. Maybe there was a matriarchy after all. If only the idea hadn’t depended for so long on the blustering of a liar.