Reflections of Ancient Anatolian Society in Archae

This book provides students of Anatolian archaeology with a revised and detailed assessment of cultural, social, economic, political, and industrial evolution in prehistoric and preliterate Anatolia. The six principal cultural periods, as discussed in Chapters 2 to 7, constitute a time span extending third millennium BC. Chapter 1 begins with a short description of the early Holocene landscape, climate, flora, and fauna and briefly touches on the Paleolithic and Epipaleolithic ancestry of Neolithic Anatolian society, while also highlighting some of the difficulties encountered in investigating and reconstructing the lives of Anatolian hunter-gatherers and agro-pastoralists, especially their subsistence modes and economic organization, social structure, and spiritual life. Among the topics covered are ethnographic analogies in prehistoric archaeology; dynamics of culture change and cultural transmission; use of cultural terminologies; and the chronology of incipience, primacy, and socio-economic complexity. Moreover, this book tries to reconstruct the nature of prehistoric religions and aspects of ritual and spiritual life. To this end, the author relies on an ethno-archaeological approach in order to illustrate the manifestations of spiritual beliefs in the material culture of totemic and shamanic societies. Additional topics discussed include: socio-economic dimensions of farming in Neolithic Anatolia; Anatolia’s involvement in the adoption of farming in Southeast Europe; Neolithic migrations and their socio-economic and cultural dimensions; the persistence of shamanism among the Neolithic farmers of Anatolia; and the urbanization process and formation of city-states.