HODDER’S METHODOLOGY

Where earlier generations of archaeologists had endeavoured to read the evidence in a straightforward fashion linking the geographical distribution of pots with an expansion of people (“from-pots-to-people”), Hodder (1990: 305) suggested that the “appearance of migration” might be an ideological creation covering a social change.

In the same fashion, with his involvement in the renewal of the work at Qatal Hoyuk, Hodder showed that whereas the “analytical” approach of the New Archaeologists had stressed the economic aspects - through, for instance, statistical studies of the relative proportions of sheep and goats - the New Archaeologists were simply avoiding the fact that some animals which played an important role in the art were represented neither among the game nor the domesticated animals. Thus their study was socially incomplete. This allowed him to argue that the artwork did not represent reality, but rather myth and memory (Hodder 2006: 12). And this necessarily opened the way to the legitimate, scientific, study of ideology.

This was the continuation of an argument begun decades earlier and published in a book (1990) and an article (1992) of the same name, The Domestication of Europe, where he attempted to track symbolism as farming spread across Europe and over the Balkans to central Europe and Scandinavia. The argument was that, without symbols, the economic change would never have been achieved. Technological and climatic features may have facilitated and allowed the change, but Hodder asked how it could make sense for people to work harder and renounce freedom in exchange for closed hierarchical communities (Hodder 1992: 243).

And the earlier Hodder (1990) answers that what made sense to people was a particular system of meaning and a certain symbolic order. This system, however, would not be the same everywhere, but adapted to the different mentalities and structures encountered while passing through Europe. It was important that in order for people to adopt agriculture, the symbolism linked to it would have to be strong enough to create a solidarity and cohesiveness among people during the hardships encountered with the new kind of economy.

The later Hodder (2006: 256) ups the ante with a twist, suggesting that settlement and agriculture more or less “just happened” - the real trigger being feasting on the one hand, and the human “entanglement” with “things” on the other.

Settlements, livestock domestication and cereal farming started in the Near East and Anatolia, and spread from there to Europe. The most profound analysis in The Domestication of Europe is based on Qatal Hoyiik. This village was characterized by a full agricultural economy: pottery, rectangular architecture, the cultivation of plants, and animal husbandry. The layout of the street-less village is remarkable, with houses built wall-to-wall and entrances from the roof leading down ladders into rather dark, windowless houses where the dead were buried under the floors. Extraordinary, too, is the indoor decoration: wall paintings and reliefs of wild animals such as leopards, vultures and bulls. Protruding vulture beaks and the skulls of weasel and fox emerge from plastic features on the walls seemingly in the form of human female breasts, while large bulls’ horns protrude from podiums on the floor, but also from the walls, threatening to injure unwary occupants. Figurines - some of animals, some of humans, some genderless, some clearly of human women - are found everywhere, most of them in middens and rubbish, but some built into walls or under floors, some around fireplaces.

As in other Near Eastern contexts, graves were regularly reopened and restructured, and new bodies were being buried together with old.

Whereas it is sometimes common, among archaeologists as well as students of religion, to infer from “burial” a “belief in a life after death” or “ancestor cult”, Hodder’s interpretations avoid labelling in this sense. This means that the analysis does not easily fit into a conventional religio-historical scheme. Instead, it can be seen as a challenge to the conventional study of religion, perhaps suggesting new ways of analysing burials as more concrete and earth-bounded.

Hodder believes that the images of wild animals on the walls mean that the dangerous could be mastered by domestication; and he understands the female figurines as both a worship of the woman as producer (of food) and reproducer (of life), but also as a metaphorical binding of the woman to the house (1992: 251).

All in all, what we see in Qatal Hdyiik is a symbolic construction of domus or “home”: by being brought inside, the wild and dangerous - the dead, the woman, the wild animals - are being tamed and domesticated. The role of the woman here is central: at one and the same time she is herself part of the wild and also the one controlling it (1990: 11).

Whereas “house” and “home” were the dominant material symbols in Anatolia and the Near East, “grave” as “house” was the main symbolic expression when settlement and agriculture was introduced into Middle Europe. In southern Scandinavia, agriculture was only adopted when linked to masculine symbolism, such as weapons, which corresponded to the power structure in Scandinavia. This suggestion of a “development” or change in the symbolic system testifies to the dynamism of Hodder’s analysis.

My whole theory would collapse if in Southeast Europe and the Near East it could be shown that domestic symbolism involving incorporation or opposition to the wild did not increase with sedentism and the adoption of more intensive subsistence strategies... The generalities allow interpretation to begin, but they have immediately to be reinterpreted in relation to the specific evidence and made to correspond with (“tested against”) that evidence.

(Hodder 1992: 251)

Qatal Hdyiik is one of the cradles of the myth of the mother goddess (cf. Mellaart 1967). This idea was built on (a) the large number of female figurines found in the early excavations, together with (b) one particular figurine of a seated female flanked by two leopards, and (c) a specific relief - headless, with legs spread apart, the arms likewise - interpreted as a woman giving birth, perhaps to bulls. Originally, in the 1960s, these finds led Mellaart to think that what he had found was a centre for the veneration of the Mother Goddess. Hodder himself never accepted this hypothesis - in fact, recent finds from Qatal Hdyiik and other sites in Anatolia are more of a non-gendered or masculine character and thus increasingly throw serious doubt on the maternity approach.

In fact, in the latest interpretation, Hodder and Meskell (2010: 34) suggest that myth and ideology in Qatal Hdyiik (as at Gobekli Tepe and Nevali Qori) are more likely to have been associated with maleness, authority and power than with femaleness.

Thus Hodder (1990, 1992, 2006) speaks of “women” but not of “goddesses”. In his early works (1990, 1992), it is not possible to find religious terminology at all. In Contemporary Archaeology in Theory (Hodder & Preucel 1996), the various articles are divided into sections about topics such as ecology, politics, economics, evolution, meaning and practice, gender, power and “the others”.

Whereas some of the contributors to the anthology are sceptical towards the adequacy of speaking about religion in Qatal Hdyiik, Hodder himself has finally abandoned doubt. Something like a definition of religion can perhaps be distilled from the following. In trying to catch the meaning of a foundation burial of a house, Hodder produces the example of a woman with the plastered head of a man, and concludes that “it can be called religious not because it is separate from everyday life, but because it focuses attention, arouses, refers to broader imaginings and deals with the relationship between self and community” (Hodder 2010b: 17).

Hodder’s earlier reluctance towards speaking about religion should be understood:

• in the light of his methodology that may be said to be “literary” and “work- immanent”. Interpretations remain “on the level of the text”, based on the material, in accordance with the methodology of what has been termed “the linguistic turn”. Since “religion” is a concept conceived and defined on a textual basis, it is very difficult to apply to prehistoric material.

• in the context of his previous conviction (Hodder pers. comm.) that we cannot speak about religion in a traditional sense when speaking about the Neolithic. Instead religion was something completely different, integrated with everything else. Therefore, “religion” is not the right word to use when speaking about the Neolithic.

In the light of the recent book we must ask what happened to Hodder’s scepticism. One answer would be that his distance from religion has been gradually eroding for a long time and that it follows logically from his other endeavours. The new book is just another step in the overall interpretation of Qatal Hdyiik. What was earlier hinted at is now stated clearly.

Another answer would be that Hodder has made a U-turn. Somehow, religion is no longer considered to be permeating everything but more to be found in some objects than in others: something distinct rather than all-pervasive. Thus, it is claimed that “The kinds of information that can be interpreted in terms of religion at Qatal Hdyiik include burials, paintings and installations of parts of wild animals in walls and benches” (Hodder 2010b: 15). Yet, even if a U-turn, it is actually part of Hodder’s identity as a researcher not to feel obliged to defend old ideas for ever (Hodder 1992).