Figurine Worlds at Çatalhöyük: Materiality, Mobility and ProcessLynn Meskell Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology Stanford University
Paper excerpt: In this paper I have several aims and my discussion oscillates between a refiguring of the 1960s project materials at Catalhöyük and the finds from the new, excavations since the mid 1990s. First, I want to present a more comprehensive and representative range of figurines from the site, balancing out the sensationalized finds of the so-called Mother Goddess images. This includes forefronting the abbreviated human forms in clay, the ubiquitous animal figurines and the prominence of clay bucrania and horns produced possibly as metonyms. I then want to give a sense of the findings from preliminary spatial analysis conducted in the 2005 season, thus providing a framework for the context and circulation of figurine materials. This leads us to consider the constitution of figurine worlds at Catalhöyük, to challenge the very special notion of the category of figurine, and to radically decenter it as art, perhaps even as religion in the conventional sense or at least differentiate between types of figurines or between the image of the figurine and those in wall paintings and so on. Central to these challenges are the possibilities for radical revisioning of the figurines by using various media such as video and experimental reconstruction (see Meskell and Nakamura 2005). These provide ways of viewing the materials that potentially offer new windows onto ancient constructions. |