THE ROLE OF MATERIAL CULTURE
The major characteristic of Qatal Hdyiik is the focus on things. This sets a decisive contrast to everything that came before: in the Palaeolithic there was nothing to own, and people had only what they could carry.
Settling down in villages and houses opened the possibility of storing, keeping and hiding. So people started producing, and the production of things brought with it innumerable further “entanglements”, such as the organization of acquiring raw materials for production (obsidian, clay), assistance for repairing things when they wore out (houses, fireplaces), the practice of navigating among the packed houses and villages, and the organization of exchange with others: keeping and giving. Hodder speaks of a “material entanglement” - an engagement and involvement with things, their production, their life, their use, their discardment, from tools and figurines, to dead people and houses: “social life at Catalhdyiik came to depend on materials, and materials acted as agents in social life. As crafted material objects were exchanged, their ‘thingness’ had social effects” (Hodder 2006: 187).This kind of engagement has characterized the world from the days of Qatal Hdyiik until now. It is clear that this involvement not only signified openings, invention and creativity, but that it was also a trap, making it impossible to escape from the “thing-world” where gossip and conflict also have a good chance of thriving (2006: 195).
At the same time, the world of things induces order. Thus:
as a child grew up in these houses it would learn that certain things could be done here but not there, that some people could sit there but not here, and that movement around space mirrored and created social distinctions... So symbolic and mythical representations are also linked into the fabric of the house and into the social distinctions found there.
(Hodder 2006: 228)
Important to note in this interpretation is the non-repetition of models drawn from anthropology or the study of religion. Although speaking about myths and “system of belief’ (2006: 172), these are not the focus, and there is no attempt at forcing models of the “trickster” or “gods”, and so on, onto the archaeological material. Instead, what is offered is the synthesis of “material entanglement” - a “model” made on the basis of the study of material culture which could perhaps be of use also for the study of religion.