ANIMAL BONES
by Louise Martin and Nerissa Russell
During the 1997 field season, detailed recording of animal bone material from all areas of excavation was undertaken. Most of the material was recorded in full onto the specially-designed Çatalhöyük Faunal Database (integrated with the rest of the site database), which attempts to document each fragment of bone/tooth to some level, therefore providing a rich source of data for both subsistence studies, contextual analyses and taphonomic considerations.
(Left: work in progress in the faunal reamins lab.) Analysis is still at an early stage and results remain tentative, but certain trends are apparent. A broad range of taxa appear at the site: sheep, goat, cattle, equids, pig, deer, dog, wolf, fox, and small numbers of various wild carnviores. Sheep and goat dominate in all areas, with more sheep than goat. The sheep:goat ratio for the Mellaart area is 6:1, for the Summit area is 11:1, and for the North area is 1:2. The North area ratio is skewed by a high goat horn core count, largely attributable to a pile of morphologically wild goat horn cores on top of the lentil bin.
Both red and roe deer have been recovered from Mellaart; only red deer from North, and neither from Summit. Fallow deer remains a possibility, given several fragments of antler that are somewhat flattened but too small to be clearly diagnostic. The cervids are represented almost entirely by antler, much of it worked. Thus their presence at the site may be largely due to the acquisition of antler by collection or exchange, rather than procurement and consumption of the whole body. This pattern is particularly interesting given the well-known depictions of deer being hunted or captured in the wall art. In combination with the relatively high numbers of equids at the site, it may indicate that the immediate surroundings were more steppic than forested. This is also supported by the low proportions of pigs/boar in all areas studied.
This season we have clarified the taxonomic distribution of the equids, following Davis (1980). Three species of equids are represented at Çatalhöyük: the most numerous is Equus hydruntinus, while E. hemionus and E. caballus are present in small quantities. The equids seem to be composed disproportionately of older age groups, perhaps indicating that prime adults were too hard to capture. The Summit area has only larger equids, probably E. caballus. Elsewhere, there are both larger and smaller equids. E. caballus was thus still present in the area at least through the period of the occupation of the North area.
A central question of our research involves the question of domestication. We are not yet at a stage where this can be addressed satisfactorily. Due to the high degree of fragmentation of the bone at Çatalhöyük, the number of measured specimens is still too low to assess domestication status metrically. There are some intriguing observations that we will be pursuing in future work, however. The cattle appear to sort visually into two, and we have recovered several morphologically wild horncores. As yet there are no clearly domestic horn cores, but some from the North house do show considerable variation in size and shape that may exceed that attributable to sexual and individual variation within a wild population. Similarly, sheep seem to sort into two distinct sizes, seen most clearly in the Summit area: most are medium-size, but a few are very large, probably beyond expected sexual dimorphism. One morphologically wild sheep horn core has been recovered from unit 1873 in the Mellaart area. So far, the limited number of pig remains appear morphologically wild.