Çatalhöyük: The Leopard's Tale
Revealing the Mysteries of Turkey's Ancient 'Town'
Ian Hodder
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Çatalhöyük in central Turkey shot to international fame when an ancient ‘town’ – at 9,000 years old one of the earliest in the world – was discovered together with wonderful wall-paintings and sculptures, many featuring images of leopards and figurines that to some suggested the existence of a ‘Mother Goddess’ cult.
The excavations changed our understanding of the early farmers who started the road to civilization, but many questions were left unanswered until new research was initiated by the leading archaeologist Ian Hodder. Çatalhöyük: The Leopard’s Tale is the inside story of the remarkable advances made so far.
The book begins with a puzzle. Why, when leopards are such a central part of Çatalhöyük’s art, have virtually none of their remains been found? In solving this mystery, the reader is led gradually into an elaborate social and symbolic world where people were buried, often later to be exhumed and decapitated, the head then handed down from generation to generation.
The leopard comes to be seen as a powerful supernatural component in intricate human interactions. Hodder peels back these layers of history to reveal how people lived and died, engaged with one another and their environment and with the
spirit world.
This is a tour de force of archaeological writing, a dynamic first-hand account full of insights into past lives and momentous events, richly illustrated with images of the art, artifacts and the excavations at this world-famous site.
Ian Hodder is Dunlevie Family Professor in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University. Before that he taught at Cambridge University and was made a Fellow of the British Academy. He has been Director of the Çatalhöyük Research Project since 1993. His major publications include Symbols in Action, Reading the Past, The Domestication of Europe, and The Archaeological Process.
Also of interest:
Inside the Neolithic Mind
The Language of The Goddess: Unearthing the
Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization
Goddess: Mother of Living Nature |
|  |  | | | | ISBN 0500051410 | | ISBN-13 978-0500051412 | | | | 24.0 x 16.7 cm | | Hardback | | 288pp | | 137 illustrations, 24 in colour | | First published 2006 | | | | £24.95 | | | |  | | | | 
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