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5 - The Historical Self: Memory and Religion at Çatalhöyük

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

By
J. Wentzel van Huyssteen
Edited by
Ian Hodder
Ian Hodder
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
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Summary

For a philosophical theologian deeply committed to interdisciplinary discourse with the sciences, the remarkable privilege of being involved in Ian Hodder’s Çatalhöyük project has indeed been enriching as well as an extraordinary challenge. Most importantly, I have learned that archaeology presents us with a very unusual problem of semantic innovation: in looking back to the distant past, how does new meaning come to be, and, in doing so, how does interpretation enable us to reconfigure often long-forgotten meanings of the past? For the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, this kind of hermeneutical venture always involved a radically interdisciplinary journey and the long route of multiple hermeneutical detours in direct dialogue with the human sciences, the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology (cf. Ricoeur in Kearney 2004: 124). In these boundary crossings or border exchanges between reasoning strategies, various disciplines transversally connect around shared problems. Therefore, in spite of the fact that the staple of archaeology has always been material culture, interpretations of the archaeological record are also profoundly anchored in the integration of input from other disciplines (Belfer-Cohen and Hovers 2010: 167). In the art of deciphering indirect meaning the past is indeed always mediated through an endless process of cultural, political, historical, and scientific interpretations. And it is this kind of hermeneutics that is fundamentally important for any approach to Çatalhöyük and will shape the interdisciplinary epistemology of what we can remember and know about this city.

Type
Chapter
Information
Religion at Work in a Neolithic Society
Vital Matters
 , pp. 109 - 133
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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