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Documenta Praehistorica XLVII (2020)
Chris Doherty’s study focuses on the role of clay in
the development of Çatalhöyük, the famous and
largest Neolithic settlement in the Konya Plain in cen-
tral Anatolia. The author offers a holistic approach
to understand the interrelationship between all clay
materials used at the site and the landscape. Çatal-
höyük lies on the clay-rich bed of the former Pleisto-
cene Lake Konya, which lacked local sources of
stone, and this makes its position interesting as clay
plays a dual role here, i.e. as the main landscape
component and a raw material for different types of
material culture at the site. The book is divided into
10 chapters and is supported with many illustrative
figures and tables.
In the first chapter, The clay world of Çatalhöyük,
Doherty first introduces the questions regarding the
need to study clay in the Neolithic and presents the
analysed archaeological site and its regional context.
At Çatalhöyük, the community was clearly familiar
with the use of clay from the earliest building levels,
and could skilfully exploit clay for a wide variety of
domestic and symbolic uses. A lot of the related is-
sues have already been studied in detail, but Doherty
attempts to combine this data and answer a series of
questions on topics such as: How was clay used at
the site? What were the resources and how did these
change? What was the nature of the landscape
around the site? What was the relationship between
the material culture and landscape? Was the site suc-
cessful due to its clays?
The research also is framed by Tim Ingold’s term
taskcape, i.e. a socially constricted space defined by
related human activities (Ingold T. 1993. The Tem-
porality of the Landscape. World Archaeology 25(2):
152–174), although Doherty proposes a new term
and tries to work with a ‘clayscape’, i.e. a clay-ori-
ented taskscape for Çatalhöyük.
In the second chapter, Clay-based material culture
studies at Çatalhöyük: a review, the author presents
us with a brief review of publications that relate to
the four main aspects of living with clay at Çatalhö-
yük: materials (clay artefacts), the technology of pro-
duction, the resources available, and the clay-rich
landscape of the site. Here, details on artefacts and
materials such as mudbricks, plaster, pottery, clay
balls, geometric clay objects, stamp seals, and fig-
urines are presented with information and results
on studies that focused on these individual types,
as well as with a comment on problems that arouse
from them. Doherty sees the major problem with
these studies in the fact that each of these materials
was researched singularly, and the clay material cul-
ture was mostly interpreted without any considera-
tion of the raw materials and their distribution in
the landscape.
In the third chapter, titled The clay landscape of
Çatalhöyük, the author presents the results of land-
scape studies at the site and focuses mostly on the
multi-year KOPAL project and its results (e.g., Roberts
N. et al. 1999. Chronology and stratigraphy of Late
Quaternary sediments in the Konya Basin, Turkey:
Results from the KOPAL Project. Quaternary Science
Reviews 18(4–5): 611–630). The project proposed
a view of Çatalhöyük and its surrounding that were
in stark contrast to Mellaart’s (Mellaart J. 1967. Ça-
tal Höyük: a Neolithic town in Anatolia. McGraw-
Hill) and Cohen’s (Cohen H. R. 1970. The palaeoe-
cology of south central Anatolia at the end of the
Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene. Ana-
tolian Studies 20: 119–137) visions of the site as
centred on a grass steppe. The KOPAL project envi-
sioned an area filled with backswamps and river
channels in the Neolithic, and a drier landscape only
at the end of the Neolithic, with the nearest area
suitable for agriculture more than 10km away from
Çatalhöyük. These results prompted Ian Hodder
(Hodder I. 2006. The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the
Mysteries of Çatalhöyük. Thames & Hudson. New
York), the excavator of the more recent excavations,
to suggest that the site was chosen for its availabi-
lity to clay more than for its agriculture potential.
The KOPAL project results were mostly disproven
with archaeobotanical, faunal and other biogenic
studies, as well as from clay studies conducted in pre-
vious work by Doherty (Doherty C. 2013. Sourcing
Book review
Chris Doherty
The Clay World of Çatalhöyük. A fine-grained perspective.
xv+120 pages, 95 figures, 18 tables. 2020, BAR International Series 2981, BAR Publishing, Oxford.
ISBN 978 1 4073 5422 4 paperback
DOI> 10.4312\dp.47.33
Documenta Praehistorica XLVII (2020) – Book review
573
the Lower Alluvium) to re-interpret Çatalhöyük’s lo-
cal environment and that of the Southern Konya
Plain. The alluvial system proposed by the KOPAL
project is inappropriate for this physiographic set-
ting. An alternative alluvial system is thus proposed
which, together with an acknowledgment of changes
due to soil formation, presents a truer picture of the
landscape context for the Neolithic clay deposits.
Here a view emerges that the landscape around the
site was much drier than that proposed by the KO-
PAL model, and brings the narrative back to the well-
watered grassland setting already proposed by Mel-
laart and Cohen.
In chapter six, The Holocene alluvium – a clay for
all purposes, the Holocene alluvium, i.e. a silty cal-
careous clay, is explored in more detail. Special fo-
cus is put on early mudbricks vs. mudbricks in the
later occupation phases. The alluvium was used ini-
tially as it was a readily available surface clay, and
as such an attractive raw material. After the South M
phase these dark alluvial clays were no longer used
for mudbricks, and the conflict arising between the
continued use of this material and its corresponding
fertile soils is seen as the probable cause for the sud-
den abandonment of dark clay mubricks.
In chapter seven, A common ground: the white
marls and lake clays of the Konya Plain, the white
marls are explored in more detail. This material was
used for the final plaster layers of floors and walls
and has already been extensively studied, but the
burnt lime plaster technology, an obvious PPNB con-
nection, that was proposed for the earliest layers at
Çatalhöyük is questioned here. Doherty presents
firm evidence that burnt lime plaster was more la-
bour intensive to produce and complicated to use
compared to the readily available white marl (which
is strikingly obvious from the comparison of the ope-
rational sequences of both processes in Figure 7.5).
Next a micro-textural analysis is presented that pro-
ves the use of softlime, found in weathered Neogene
limestone outcrops west and southwest of the settle-
ment, was present at Çatalhöyük from the formation
of the site onwards. As such, there is no solid archa-
eological evidence for burnt lime technology at Ça-
talhöyük.
Additionally, non-white marls are also presented in
this section of the book, and these became more im-
portant after the South M phase, with the author
arguing that the diversity of clays around the site
was more important than white marl availability
alone, as argued by Hodder (2006).
Çatalhöyük’s Clays. In I. H. Hodder (ed.), Substan-
tive technologies at Çatalhöyük: reports from the
2000–2008 seasons. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology
Press: 51–66). These results suggest that Çatalhöyük
was located in a landscape with localized wetlands,
not in a continuous seasonal wetland with only a
few dry areas.
The fourth chapter, Establishing the sequence of
clay use, presents the clays identified by the artefact
timelines to reconstruct the actual clay deposits that
might have been present in Çatalhöyük’s landscape
or have been brought from elsewhere. The main ob-
served patterns of clay use include the use of allu-
vial dark clays in the earliest levels (i.e. Lower Al-
luvium in the KOPAL stratigraphy) for making mud-
bricks, and this then changes in the South M phase.
A similar observation can be made for mortars and
plasters, clay balls, pottery, and geometric clay ob-
jects. Only figurines were made from whatever clay
was available at all occupation layers, while stamp
seals show a lack of fabric variations and have a
fixed composition.
Doherty also proposes using clay colour as a useful
investigative approach as people at Çatalhöyük made
full use of this in their material culture. Although co-
lour is systematically recorded in excavation and
post-excavation, it has not been interpreted in land-
scape terms (except in the KOPAL stratigraphy). Clay
colour, as argued by Doherty, can provide the essen-
tial link between clay material culture, raw materials
and landscape that allows clay use to be examined
on all levels of engagement.
The author then presents the four fundamental clay
groups identified at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, of which
the first three are local materials (the dark alluvial
clays, the white marls and the local calcareous red
clays as a continuous sedimentary sequence, the col-
luvial clays), but the fourth is of non-local charac-
ter (non-local non-calcareous red clays) and implies
the transport of clays or finished artefacts. As these
four groups also have different temporal ranges
they provide the most logical framework for explor-
ing life with clay at Çatalhöyük.
The following five chapters deal with these four clay
groups and their interpretation in more detail.
Starting with Reinterpreting the Holocene alluvium:
challenging Çatalhöyük’s clay foundation (Chap-
ter 5), the author details the first of these four fun-
damental clay groups, the Holocene dark clays (i.e.
Documenta Praehistorica XLVII (2020) – Book review
574
Chapter eight, Colluvium: the rise of new clay,
looks at a new clay source recognized at Çatalhöyük,
i.e. the colluvium which is an unconsolidated earth
material that has been transported down the tell
by gravity and accumulates at its base. The compo-
sition of the colluvium is a direct reflection of the
material brought onsite, as it is a mixture of degrad-
ed mudbricks, plaster and mortar. This type of ma-
terial, as argued by Doherty, was not only the domi-
nant clay for mudbrick building after the South M
phase at Çatalhöyük, but also had beneficial effects
on the local landscape. The concept of a clay cycle is
proposed and explored in more detail, as the dyna-
mic link between clay material culture and landscape
was fully developed only with the colluvium phase.
The proposed ‘clay cycle’ explains most of the high
volume clay transitions at Neolithic Çatalhöyük.
In the ninth chapter, Arrivals from a distant clay-
scape, the only non-local clays used at Çatalhöyük
are presented. These were used only for a single
group of artefacts, specifically the pottery that ap-
peared at South M and which then dominated until
the later levels. These clays are the only departure
from a full reliance of the Çatalhöyük people on
nearby local clays. This change corresponds to the
first use of mineral-rich ‘gritty’ clays that were first
recorded by Mellaart, but their non-local character
was not appreciated until the Hodder excavations.
Doherty presents the pottery forms as well as the
full fabric sequence, established after petrographical
examination of thin sections. Here convincing re-
sults are presented as the mineral inclusions in grit-
ty wares clearly point to the use of non-local non-
calcareous raw materials, as these inclusions are not
present in the local calcareous clays. However, it is
not clear whether clay or readily made pottery was
transported to Çatalhöyük.
The final chapter, Conclusions, brings together the
main topics discussed in the book as well as all the
results which provides a more holistic approach to
the clay-based material culture at Çatalhöyük and
its place in the context of the local landscape. Even
more importantly, Doherty shows how the site’s fa-
voured location on the Konya Plain afforded both
raw materials and an environment suitable for early
farming, against the view presented by the prevail-
ing KOPAL landscape model. This change to the land-
scape model will of course have major implications
on how all aspects of life at Çatalhöyük are seen, as
rightly pointed out by the author.
The factors behind non-local clay use have not been
clearly established by this research, as Doherty
notes himself, and it is therefore not clear whether
pottery made from gritty clays was appreciated be-
cause it fitted a new preferred style, or whether
technological superiority was a factor – only further
work will be able to fully interpret what this varia-
tion points to. Nevertheless, Doherty’s book is an in-
teresting multidisciplinary view of clay, clay materi-
al culture, and landscape, as well as the different va-
riations that bind them. The book would benefit
from some more figures of higher quality, but apart
from this it is a well-researched, well-documented,
thought-provoking, and inspiring book for any re-
searcher dealing with clay raw materials, pottery,
and landscape studies.
Andreja Ωibrat Ga∏pari≠
Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana