Reports on animal bones from archaeological sites often include information about the “kill-off pattern” for each species – i.e. the relative representation of different age-groups in the sample. Osteologists believe that this information can be used as evidence for whether an animal was wild or domesticated, and, if domesticated, about the way in which man managed the animal. In this paper a method is described for recording such data for sheep and goat using mandibles and mandibular teeth; the analysis and interpretation of such data is discussed using excavated samples from Aşvan Kale.

When people keep sheep or goats, the age at which the animals are slaughtered depends on a range of factors: on the relative value placed on the different products, on the characteristics of the stock, and on a range of environmental factors – in particular, seasonal variation in the availability of grazing and feed. If meat production is the aim, most of the young males are killed when they reach the optimum point in weight-gain, only a few being kept for breeding.

The third season of excavations at Çatal Hüyük lasted from 10th June until 30th August, 1963, seventy working days with an average of thirty-five men, some local but most from the Beycesultan area, under our foreman, Veli Karaaslan, and our trusted ustas, Rifat Çelimli, Mustafa Duman, and Bekir Kalayci.

The 1963 season received financial support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York, the Bollingen Foundation, New York, the Munroe Fund of the University of Edinburgh, The British Academy, the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada, the Australian Institute of Archaeology, the Institute of Archaeology of the University of London, an anonymous donation, and Unilever, Istanbul, and transport and survey equipment from BP Aegean, Ltd., Istanbul.

The mountains of the Eastern Mediterranean have a long history of human occupation and exploitation of the natural environment (Grenon, Batisse 1989; McNeil 1992). Whilst the reconstruction of vegetation and human-induced landscape change is primarily based upon pollen analysis and other palaeoecological methods, the history of human occupation relies heavily upon archaeology, including field survey information and excavation reports. Both palaeoecology and archaeology are supplemented by historical accounts, especially for later periods, and when these data sources are combined they have the potential to provide a much fuller picture of settlement and landscape change than the reliance on a single source (Wagstaff 1985). There are, however, problems and limitations associated with each of the different data sources.

The excavations at Çatal Hüyük, the neolithic city mound in the Konya Plain, which were begun in 1961 were continued during the summer of 1962. The second season of excavation began on 7th June and lasted until 14th August, sixty working days, with a labour force which never exceeded thirty-five men, mostly trained under our foreman, Veli Karaaslan, at Beycesultan and Hacılar. Once again our trusted ustas included Rifat Çelimli, Mustafa Duman and Bekir Kalayci. Survey equipment and transport for the expedition were generously provided by Turkse Shell, Ankara.

The 1962 season was financed by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York, a bequest from the late Mr. Francis Neilson, the Australian Institute of Archaeology and its President, Mr. W. J. Beasley, The British Academy, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. In addition the Director had a personal fellowship from the Bollingen Foundation, New York.

The site of Çatal Hüyük was discovered during our survey of the Konya Plain in November, 1958. Rich in surface finds of a type hitherto only known from Professor J. Garstang's excavations at Mersin on the south coast of Anatolia, its importance was soon realised. However, at the time of the discovery, we were engaged in the excavation of the equally important site of Hacılar and it was not until after the completion of excavations there that digging could be contemplated at Çatal Hüyük. After the final season at Hacılar in 1960, we were free to devote our attention to this new site.

As Hacılar showed a gap in its culture sequence exactly during the Early Neolithic period, which surface finds showed was best represented at Çatal Hüyük, it was decided to start excavations at this site to complete the sequence and throw further light on Hacılar.

Wheat, barley and peas, traditional grain-crops of the Western World are, by now, well known to have originated in the Near East. It was the cultivation of the wild ancestors of these crops, beginning soon after the end of the last European Ice Age, that eventually led to an utterly new way of life for most of the population of Europe and Western Asia, a new Neolithic culture based on food production and complete with appropriately adapted tool assemblages and relatively permanent living structures. Soon, from different parts of the Near East, this new pattern of subsistence based on wheats, barleys and pulse crops spread in all directions. One direction led up the Balkan Peninsula and into Central and, eventually, Northern Europe where the Near Eastern, Neolithic, cereal-pulse culture spawned temperate-adapted versions of just the same patterns of subsistence.

Rye, however, has played no part in this story as told to date, this despite the fact that, as Europeans, we automatically associate rye with wheat and barley, the two other providers of our ‘daily bread’.

This paper summarises and interprets data from the Neolithic site ot Çatalhöyük East collected between 2000 and 2008, while at the same time integrating data from earlier and more recent excavation seasons. The paper focuses on evidence for change during the occupation of the site, arguing for an increase in the size and density of occupation into the middle levels associated with symbolic and ritual elaboration within an aggressively egalitarian community. The middle ‘classic’ levels at Çatalhöyük were associated with increased workload, physical stresses and illness. The pressures were relieved in the upper levels after 6500 BC by shifts to greater mobility, increased economic independence of houses and dispersal of population. This shift in the upper levels may be of relevance to the spread of farming populations into northwestern Anatolia and Europe.

A fourth season of excavation at Çatal Hüyük took place between 18th July and 25th September 1965 under the auspices of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara with Professor O. R. Gurney as director administratively responsible to the Turkish Authorities. The excavation staff were Mr. and Mrs. James Mellaart, Miss Pamela Pratt and Miss Priscilla Berridge as conservators, Miss Raymonde Enderlé Ludovici (artist), Mr. and Mrs. N. Alcock (surveyor), Mr. Ian Todd, Mlle Anne Timonier and Mr. J. Jurriaanse as field assistants. Bayan Nemika Altan and Bay Mehmet Turgut, both from the Ankara Archaeological Museum, were our official Turkish Representatives.

The excavation was sponsored by the British Academy, the Universities of Edinburgh and London, The Royal Ontario Museum, Canada, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Bollingen Foundation, both in New York, the Australian Institute of Archaeology, the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara and the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin. BP Aegean Ltd. in Istanbul once again supported the expedition with survey equipment and transport.

A great deal is being written about the methods of analysing data after it has been collected on an archaeological site; very little, however, has been said about the methods by which the data is retrieved. It may be that the two are not really separate.

Since the appearance of Archaeology from the Earth in 1954, further development of the excavation methods there propounded by Sir Mortimer Wheeler has been neglected. Too often, it seems, excavation techniques are assumed to be ‘scientific’ because of a resemblance, chance or not, to something advocated in that basic and fundamental work. It is the intention here to suggest that there are retrieval techniques which might, with advantage, be used alongside the very high standard, advanced by Wheeler, of excavation by soil-stratification. The experiment described below is one of several which are, at present, being developed to meet the problems of archaeological recovery techniques.

During the 1972 season of the Aşvan excavations (see French, 1973, p. 77) it was decided that, given the huge quantity of charcoal recovered (292 samples) from the four sites by water-sieving and trench sampling from strata which cover a period of c. 4,500–5,000 years, an analysis of the charcoals would prove revealing. Part of the aim of the research is to evaluate what information is available from charcoals recovered by modern methods, and to determine if it is possible to draw sound conclusions about vegetational changes which have not been fully recorded for the late Holocene in Eastern Anatolia. Although some data has been made available through pollen analysis (see van Zeist, 1968, pp. 19–39) the distribution, duration and composition of the forest which existed before deforestation is not entirely understood.

A dearth of necessary data on which to base this work made contemporary studies a prerequisite. Firstly an adequate comparative collection of identified modern woods had to be built up to aid identification of ancient charcoals. Secondly, a reliable method of sub-sampling had to be devised in order to deal with the copious material.

Although a relatively unimportant crop in the Near East, millet has an especially interesting history that may throw some light on the cultural relationships of the Middle–Late Bronze Ages and the Iron Age. Thus the prompt, separate, publication of a large deposit of foxtail millet (Setaria italica (L.) P. Beauv.), recently identified from an Iron Age level at Tille Höyük, seems justified. This is the first find of the cereal in such large quantities—definitely as a crop—from the Near East or Greece. The rest of the plant remains from this level will be published in conjunction with the rich samples that are expected to be found in the massive Late Bronze Age burnt level at Tille. The opportunity is also taken in this paper to present other previously unpublished millet samples, from second millennium B.C. levels at Haftavan Tepe, northwestern Iran, and from Hellenistic, Roman and Medieval levels at Aşvan Kale, eastern Turkey.

A full discussion of these criteria will be included in the first author's forthcoming publication of the Aşvan plant remains. Knörzer (1971) has published a useful key to millet seeds. Three genera of millets (all belonging to the tribe Paniceae of the grass family) have grains of the relatively wide, large embryoed type discussed here.

Intensive archaeobotanical investigations at Çatalhöyük have created a unique opportunity to explore change and continuity in plant use through the ca 1,500-year Neolithic to early Chalcolithic sequence of an early established farming community. The combination of crops and herd animals in the earliest (Aceramic) part of the sequence reflects a distinct and diverse central Anatolian ‘package’ at the end of the eighth millennium cal. BC. Here we report evidence for near continual adjustment of cropping regimes through time at Çatalhöyük, featuring recruitment of minor crops or crop contaminants to become major staples. We use panarchy theory to frame an understanding of Çatalhöyük's long-term sustainability, arguing that its resilience was a function of three key factors: its diverse initial crop spectrum, which acted as an archive for later innovations; its modular social structure, enabling small-scale experimentation and innovation in cropping at the household level; and its agglomerated social morphology, allowing successful developments to be scaled up across the wider community. This case study in long-term sustainability through flexible, changeable cropping strategies is significant not only for understanding so-called boom and bust cycles elsewhere but also for informing wider agro-ecological understanding of sustainable development in central Anatolia and beyond.

At the beginning of the second settlement a change that we can define as a ‘breaking point’ takes place in Trojan indigenous cultural development. Behind this change must lie, to a great extent, the intensification of Troy's cultural and economic relations with the interior of Anatolia and beyond (north Syria and Mesopotamia). This change is archaeologically most evident in the pottery; the potter's wheel is introduced to Troy IIb along with new forms and wares. For a long time it has been widely accepted that the wheel – in use in north Syria and Cilicia since the Late Chalcolithic period – became known in the interior of western Anatolia only after its appearance at Troy, and there has been a general consensus that the potter's wheel and other Mesopotamian influences reached Troy through maritime trade from Cilicia westward and northward along the Anatolian coastline. The author, on the other hand, as early as the mid 1980s, had begun to defend the thesis that Trojan-Cilician relations were established over inland western Anatolia, rather than by sea. Here again he deals with the subject, now strengthened by new evidence that continues to come to light from recent investigations and excavations within western Anatolia – most especially that from Küllüoba, where excavation has been continuing under the author's auspices since 1996. The author now goes one step further to define this overland route between Cilicia and the north Aegean as the ‘Great Caravan Route’.

The historical geography of Anatolia in the period sourced by the Boǧazköy texts (Middle-Late Bronze Age) has proved an on-going problem since they first became available, and nowhere was this more acutely felt than in southern and western Anatolia, generally acknowledged as the site of the Arzawa lands, also probably the Lukka lands. A major advance has been registered since the mid-1980s, with the publication and interpretation of the Hieroglyphic inscription of Tudhaliya IV from Yalburt, and the Cuneiform treaty on the Bronze Tablet of the same king. These two documents have established that the later territory of Rough Cilicia constituted the Late Bronze Age kingdom of Tarhuntassa with its western border at Perge in Pamphylia, and that the Lukka lands did indeed occupy all of (or more than) classical Lycia in the south-west. These recognitions, by establishing the geography of the south and south-west, correspondingly reduced the areas of uncertainty in the west.

In 1997 I was fortunately able to establish the reading of the Hieroglyphic inscription attached to the long-known Karabel relief, which lies inland from Izmir in a pass across the Tmolos range between Ephesos and Sardis. This can be shown to give the name of Tarkasnawa, King of Mira, and those of his father and grandfather, also kings of Mira but with names of uncertain reading. This is the same king known from his silver seal (referred to as ‘Tarkondemos' from an early and incorrect identification), and impressions of other seals of his have more recently been found at Boǧazköy. Clearly he was an important historical figure.

The deposits of carbonized grain and seeds excavated at Çatal Hüyük are the largest and best preserved finds of their kind ever recovered from so early periods in the Old World. Indeed the volume is so great that it is a matter of years just to examine the plant remains and put names to the many species. The development of the proper attitude of mind in the examiner is by necessity a slow process when he is faced with so many completely novel cultural circumstances that there is no valid background of reference. However, five months' ecological and floristic studies on the spot have cleared up so many problems that a satisfactory result may be anticipated in due course. The generosity of the Danish Carlsberg Foundation and James Mellaart made this long and extremely useful excursion possible.

The opportunity to study the early farming population at Çatal Hüyük came to me through the foresight and kindness of the excavator, Mr. James Mellaart, and the successive Directors of the British Archaeological Institute Mr. Michael Gough and Dr. David French. I am most grateful to them for the opportunity to publish this report. In the autumn of 1967 I worked in collaboration with Dr. Denise Ferembach of the CNRS in Paris, who is reporting on the morphology and geographic relations of the population. We worked in the laboratory of Professor Enver Bostancı, head of the department of Palaeoanthropology at the University of Ankara, who most kindly aided us and allowed us facilities for study. The successive Directors General of Antiquities and Museums, Bay Mehmet Önder and Bay Hikmet Gürçay, also gave us permission to study this material and expressed gracious interest in it.

The Three Stelae bearing the inscriptions here published were discovered by Dr. D. S. Rice at Harran in August–September 1956, while he was engaged in examining the architecture of the ruined Great Mosque at that place. A preliminary account of his work, which is sufficient to convey the essential information about the positions and arrangement of these stones in the paving or steps of the Mosque, has been given by the discoverer in the Illustrated London News of 21st September, 1957, pp. 466 ff. All readers of this must admire the acumen which enabled Dr. Rice to “turn but a stone”, where so many “estranged faces” had missed its promise. The original monuments are stated to be kept for the present at a school-house in Urfa until arrangements have been made for their permanent conservation.

During the Autumn of 1951 and from April to November, 1952, a survey of pre-classical remains in still mostly unknown areas of Southern Turkey was undertaken with the grant of a scholarship from the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara (for the session 1951–2). A renewal of this scholarship in 1953 will make the continuation and completion of the survey possible in 1953–4.

A vast amount of new material, some of which is of great importance for Anatolian prehistory, having been collected, it was considered advisable to write a preliminary report dealing with the pottery in order to make preliminary results immediately available rather than postpone it until the end of the survey. Hence the sketchy nature of this report which deals with pottery groups only, and the unavoidable omission of the description of the sites, size, period and distribution maps and general conclusions.

The Mycenaean culture of the east Aegean islands should not be considered in relation to that of the Greek Mainland, as has generally been done up until now, but rather in terms of the East Aegean — West Anatolian Interface (fig 1), an area which forms an entity between the Mycenaean islands of the central Aegean and the Anatolian hinterland with Troy at its northern extremity and Rhodes at its southern one.

The full analysis of the initial and most exhaustive of our studies of present-day agriculture at Aşvan could not be completed in time for the present volume. It seemed relevant, however, to present a brief outline of some of the principles involved and the data collected.

Samples of vegetable remains represent a body of information which is concerned (in part, at least) with human manipulations of plant resources. These plants may have functioned as foods, fuels, building-timber, tools, dyes, drugs, cosmetics or as decorations. The compounded information may, further, suggest certain forms of ancient economy, though quantification of the data at a level representative of the settlement as a whole is rarely possible. Any such inferences can, however, only exist within the realms of one's own familiarity with equivalent modern situations (or, less consistently, historical situations). If our deductions here are to be repeatable, our present-day (or historical) models must be defined: it is not sufficient to have hazy analogues lurking in the data banks of our subconscious.