EXCAVATIONS AT PINARBASI
The following is taken from a report provided by Trevor Watkins, University of Edinburgh, who directed a second season of excavations at the Pinarbasi rock shelters and open site in collaboration with Cengiz Topal, Assistant Director of the Karaman Museum. Because of the great pressure on living and working space at Çumra, the Edinburgh team was accommodated in Karaman, and had working space provided by the Karaman Museum.
The purpose of investigating the sites at Pinarbasi is to recover evidence of human occupation and use of the Konya plain earlier than and contemporary with the settlement of Çatalhöyük, during the period when hunter-gatherer groups in some parts of western Asia first became sedentary and then turned to cultivation and to herding. The purpose of the second season of excavation was to continue and extend the soundings in one of the rock-shelters, begun in 1994. The last significant occupation of the shelter has been radiocarbon dated to the middle to late 6th millennium bc (uncalibrated), that is, the late Neolithic towards the beginning of the Chalcolithic periods.
As a result of the 1995 excavations we now have a much better picture of a large stone structure found in the rock-shelter, Area B. We also have identified the rapid infilling of the structure with occupation debris, and understood its stratigraphic relationship to the last stages of occupation above it, although we still have to extend the excavation in order to recover the full plan of the structure, and find if it was part of a larger-scale occupation. The sampling and recovery strategy has produced excellent samples of carbonised plant remains, and plans for extensive research on the animals bones, the archaeobotanical remains and the wood charcoals are now in hand.
The provisional study of the finds points to some marked contrasts with Çatalhöyük - in particular, the lack of ceramics and of groundstone such as mortars, pestles and querns. A possible scarcity of cereal remains and a large number of equids require further examination, but the possibility of a very different set of practices at this site must be entertained. The central question relating to the later Neolithic at Pinarbasi concerns the nature of the occupation and the relationship of the occupants to the communities that lived on höyüks on the plain. Were the people who occupied the rock-shelter in the 6th millennium bc using it seasonally, for example, as a hunting station for killing and butchering wild equids? Or were they a small permanent community at the margins of the society that occupied the plain, earning their living by supplying, for example, meat of wild animals? Further excavation and detailed study of the cultural assemblage, the animal bones and the botanical evidence will be needed to help us to address these questions.