Pits and Places: Using anticipation to characterize deposits at Neolithic Çatalhöyük
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-03-02

The burial of assorted artefacts in pits or fill layers presents an interpretive challenge to archaeologists. Our first instinct may be to categorize buried deposits based on their contents, as in the examples of graves, hoards, and storage pits. In many cases, however, the contents of pits vary widely, proving ambiguous and hard to classify. I propose that understanding buried deposits as fundamentally temporal events involved in making space offers one fruitful way forward. By considering the local trajectories that led up to burial events, and the futures that buried deposits helped to bring about in a space, we can distinguish productively between kinds of deposit without floundering on the sheer variety of their contents. Taking deposits within houses at Catalhoyuk as an example, I use sequential association rules analysis – a simple statistical method for identifying links in series of events – to distinguish among deposits differently involved in making social space. In this instance, an archaeology explicitly tailored to the diachronic character of space, highlighting links of anticipation and synergies across time, offers a clearer view of the archaeological record than more conventional, static approaches to classifying and investigating deposits. 

Kevin Kay (University of Cambridge)