Building Catalhoyuk: Towards an archaeology of the instant at the Neolithic site in Turkey

In this thesis I examine the heavy residue material in four buildings from the Neolithic site Catalhoyuk in Turkey. Heavy residue refers to all those 'material' fragments that sink during the flotation process. The basic principle of flotation is that the sediment is added to water and mixed so as to thoroughly break apart and wet sediment. The results of flotation are light and heavy residue materials. This thesis focuses on heavy residue material. The sediment samples of every excavated unit and material in them at Catalhoyuk provides a collection, or better yet, an archive (e.g. Lucas 2001), of "small artifact classes" (Hastorf 2005: 130) such as botanical remains, bone, obsidian, ceramics, shell, figurine fragments, stone fragments, held by the soil from which different features were molded, in other words 'the residue' of large artifact classes. While "large artifact classes" get categorized and interpreted "at the trowel's edge" (Hodder 2003: 29) the categorization of the residual material has been delayed and it takes place at the wooden tables in front of the laboratories at the site.;I argue that close attention to how and what we define as 'data' is needed in order for categories we employ routinely at various scales and levels of analysis to let us see things. In other words, "the objective existence of artifacts as "data" depends on the interpretation made prior to and during excavation" (Hodder 2003: 32). As the remains of the past we encounter are multitemporal (see Lucas 2005), archaeologists, I argue, have tended to collapse everything together and in the process of creating new categories they make false narratives. As our research questions move between long-term and short-term material practices in the past, throughout this thesis I argue that reflexivity should be maintained at all the scales of interpretation of archaeological remains.;The vast amount of, broadly speaking objects, things have been produced by archaeologists and have acquired an increasing control of what we think of as archaeological record to be. I demonstrate how heavy residue material plays a key role in archaeological narratives or in other words how due to conflation of temporalities (and research priorities) their agency has been distributed rather than incorporated.;The methodological sampling techniques employed at the site enabled me to think heavy residue. Furthermore, there is no other site that can provide such a detailed account of people's lives in the past. I focus on small scale -- though my findings have ramifications for the larger social field. This thesis was able to show that archaeological interpretations rest, in addition to approximation and averaging data, on instants that I was able to find in the tightly nested layers of the archaeological record at Catalhoyuk. To the statement "Interpretation occurs at the trowel's edge" (Hodder 2003: 33) this research adds that interpretation of the heavy residue material occurs at the table's edge (both physical wooden tables used at the site and tables produced via statistical methods). In my thesis, I have treated heavy residue materials separately but than I brought them back together as they were 'laid down in time'. The material process involved in such 'bringing-back-together' (acknowledging that the only authentic moment these objects have had was in the moment of their 'discovery', at the trowel's edge, in the field, not yet visible) shows that categories are the most misleading objects -- we do not see things from them.;Archaeology has recently been defined to be an "historical science that works not by testing theories against data but by fitting lots of different types of data together as best it can in order to make a coherent story" (Hodder 2003: 73). This thesis is about the 'how' and 'what' of the fitting process. The challenge remains when we have instants that appear chaotic and incoherent and resist averaging. These archaeological instants, observed in the course of heavy residue analysis, talks about the visibility of the movement between categories.;Heavy residue material, I argue are the window into the archaeology of the instant. As Ian Hodder (1997: 694) stated "conclusions are always momentary, fluid and flexible as new relations are considered" this thesis was able to find those moments and shows that the scope and relevance of small scale studies can reveal actions occurring over a timescale of an instant (see also Haslan 2006) inscribed in the materiality of the momentary assembling of 'things'. Such instants, while translating singularity and sequential nature of material practices, further show the impossibility of the full colonization of the 'daily' by the larger structures (cf. De Certau 1984: 31) observed at Catalhoyuk, such as for example memory, identity, religion, etc. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...