ARCHAEOBOTANY
by Christine Hastorf and Julie Near
The archaeobotanical portion of the Çatalhöyük project is expanding this year in areas excavated (BACH) and in personnel involved in the plant analysis. Having processed approximately 1200 samples from the last three years of field work during the field seasons, laboratory analysis has been ongoing since 1996. This past 1997 field season, 525 soil samples were cleaned by water flotation. This includes material from the Mellaart area, the North area including Building 1 and BACH, as well as the Summit area. Christine Hastorf of the University of California-Berkeley oversees all of the archaeobotanical information except for the Summit material. There are a series of people involved to a greater and lesser extent in the analysis of the plants, addressing different questions of the data. Julie Near of the Department of Anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley who oversaw much of the field processing in the 1996 and 1997 field season is concentrating her dissertation work on the plant evidence from the floor and associated contexts in Building 1 in the North area as well as spaces 117, 113 in the Mellaart area. She is also analyzing an overview of the excavated samples so we have a sense of the diversity and relative densities across the excavations. Part of that field team in both years was Meltem Acabay. Jon Hather of the Institute of Archaeology, University College London has joined the archaeobotanical project, overseeing wood analysis at the site. Eleni Asouti, a new post-graduate student at the Institute in London will be concentrating her dissertation work with Jon on wood analysis, with an interest in the cultural uses of wood through time. Sarah Mason also of the Institute of Archaelogy will be looking at some of the acorns from the samples. Ann Butler of the Institute continues to investigate the pulses that are both wild and domesticated at the site. Arlene Rosen of the Ben-Gurion University will join the project studying the phytolith evidence. This year she will look at a few of the particularly dense phytolith concentrations uncovered in the 1997 excavations as well as some of Building 1 floor samples from 1996. In the near future we hope also that she looks at the intriguing waterlogged material that the KOPAL project will excavate outside of the site's fence