The BACH Area
by Mirjana Stevanovic and Ruth TringhamFigure 12: BACH Area, showing location of roof and midden
Excavation in the BACH area has focused on the main large building, i.e., house 3 and two smaller rooms south from it that are separated from house 3 by a double wall. The 1998 season was funded by a senior research grant from the National Science Foundation (SBR-9805755).
House 3 is a non typical building at Çatalhöyük. It has no internal structural walls and the only division of the internal space are two thin walls running North-South, and a curtain wall in between the two. The internal walls and the curtain wall were painted in red and decorated in the central portion with a relief that had collapsed face down. A large platform painted in red was attached to the North house wall and to the interior wall. The remaining portion of the North house wall and entire East house wall had large platforms coming out towards the centre of the house. The East wall was painted in red as well. The South part of the house, where the wall was painted in black, had two platforms and a space in between that had more domestic functions.
The most striking feature of the collapsed remains in house 3 was the house roof that collapsed and its remains covered the entire central and north portion of the building. At the same time the southern part of the abandoned building was transformed into a midden area. The area for the midden was very carefully prepared and part of the domestic area was deliberately cut out; in it many large animal bones were deposited (8 cattle scapulae, 1 skull, that was deliberately truncated, ½ wild boar skull, also deliberately split, 3 cattle horns). All the bones were surrounded with plant material. The midden was also rich in the remains of fruits and nuts.
The roof which collapsed on top of the Northern part of the house has a cattle skull and fire installation; both are believed to have been on top of the roof and collapsed with the roof. This is a nice example of the roof area being used intensively for domestic and other activities.
We started to excavate space 88, a small 2x2 m cell, and have reached a probable floor at about 60 cm depth from the surface, which was covered with small grindstone fragments. Above these in the Northwest corner of the space was a mass of shoulder bones (of cattle and horse), cow skull, and red deer antler. These are located west of a probable bench feature.
Figure 13: The BACH Area midden under excavation, note the large cattle scapulae toward the front of the picture