Housing empathy: humans, animals and bodily afterlives at Çatalhöyük
Carolyn Nakamura, University of Leiden
In his 2004 article, How to talk about the Body?, Bruno Latour observes that the opposite of
being embodied (or having a body) is being dead. Specifically he defines death as being no
longer able to be affected or put into motion by other entities, humans or non-humans.
Following William James, Latour claims that to have a body is to learn to be affected: “The
body is that which leaves a dynamic trajectory and is that by which we learn to register and
become sensitive to what the world is made of” (Latour 2004, 205-6).
Although this is just one possible definition of the body, it underscores an aspect of human
sociality that contends with the agency of non-living, but powerful entities such as
supernatural and divine forces. If having a body means having the capacity to be affected,
this capacity is not always or only a physiological one; it is also a social one. The world is
made not only of material forms, beings and things, but of networks and relationships that
take on a force of their own and thus demand to be reckoned with.
In the present paper, I am interested in examining the kinds of work ‘bodies’ do in mediating
between the living and non-living realms. My discussion will focus on the materials from the
late Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük (c. 7400 - 6000 BCE), a site first excavated by James
Mellaart in the 1960s and well-known for it’s close-packed architecture with rooftop
entrances and vertical building sequences, and striking visual and embodied imagery. In the
following discussion I will consider how certain practices of embodiment, such as figurines,
wall sculptures and the reuse or recirculation of human and animal remains, may have
negotiated relationships between humans and ancestral or supernatural entities. These
materials from Çatalhöyük all comprise traditions or practices that involve the rendering or
manipulation of bodily forms with a particular focus on separated heads and bodies, the
navel and claws/talons/paws.
My specific departure here seeks to examine the peculiar status of the body in these contexts
of epistemic uncertainty. Slightly complicating Latour’s basic idea, I consider the unique
capacity of bodies to be affected and put into motion (their materiality) in the constitution of
the agency of the dead, and suggest that, more precisely, what is at stake in this particular
equation is not the embodiment of ancestral or supernatural power, but the maintenance of
a shared world between the living and dead. Sociality presumes participation and exchange in
a common world. One route to this shared or proximate reality that I find particularly
compelling is through the concept of empathy. In a non-trivial way, bodies facilitate the very
possibility of empathy - the capacity to be ‘in feeling’ as it were; and to me this is key. Both
death and supernatural forces may or may not be knowable, but surely they are socialized. In
this way, these disembodied agents can be made to ‘understand’ humans through gaining a
bodily form that is appropriately ‘affected’, which allows for the possibility of particularly
robust human-superhuman relationships.
Embodied Afterlives
In the visible realm, it is perhaps the images of animal bucrania and horns that dominate the
internal aesthetic of buildings at Çatalhöyük. Plastered animal skulls with horns attached
‘decorated’ walls, benches and pilasters inside houses (Figure 1). However, Mellaart’s
reconstructions also drew our attention to human skulls and headless bodies, as well as
defaced sculptures that are missing their heads and hands and feet or claws/paws. Recent
excavations on the site have found similar finds: various animal bucrania and horns (mostly
dismantled), headless skeletons and disarticulated skulls, and sculptures with heads, hands
and feet defaced. Since Mellaart’s time, researchers have variously interpreted these practices
in terms of art (Last 1998, 2006; Russell & Meece 2006), religious and magical practice
(Nakamura 2010; Pels & Hodder 2010), practices of embodiment (Nakamura & Meskell
2009) and animality and power (Meskell 2008; Hodder & Meskell forthcoming). All of these
interpretations to some extent assume the inclusion of ancestors or the dead in human social
and spiritual life at Çatalhöyük.
In particular, I would like to scrutinize this set of practices and materials within the general
problem of the afterlife; namely, in what ways do they suggest a connection between the
living and the dead? Cognitive psychologist, Jesse Bering (2002), asserts that humans struggle
with an idea of an afterlife, quite simply because it is epistemologically impossible to know
what it is like to be dead. Side-stepping the culturally contingent problem of what it means
‘to know’, one could rather say that it is impossible to experience death as a final and
permanent state. Freud believed that human beings lacked any innate sense of their own
deaths (Freud 1957, 289). And through years of his own research, Jung also came to believe
that the unconscious had no sense of its own mortality (Jung 1969). Consequently, the
afterlife poses a unique problem for the give-and-take negotiation of embodied cognition.
Unlike subjective, direct experiences of partial or temporary absence, such as hunger, thirst
or the sudden loss of sight or hearing - the deficiencies of which can be experienced and
therefore comprehended as such - death, as the absolute and final absence of consciousness
and embodied life, can never be experienced.1
This existential lack often precipitates a rupture in human consciousness: the impossibility of
understanding death as an absolute end. And within this void, imagination and memory take
over as people seek to create and establish not only a concept of an afterlife but a prehistory
as well. This is one of those spaces or moments that compels people to turn to the known in
order to ease their anxieties about an unknown future and inevitable end of life. In fact, it is
only through the death of others that one comes to ‘know’ death. Robert Pogue Harrison
suggests that ‘the idea of death proceeds from the dead. Indeed, it must proceed from the
corpse’ (2003, 92).
Here we find that embodied images play a significant part in this human project. Notable
scholars such as Hans Belting (2001, 2005) and Harrison (2003) have written about the
connection between images and death. Human death is perhaps most acutely signaled by the
state of no longer inhabiting a living physical body, in other words, the corpse. Harrison
points out that the corpse must be considered the first image of the dead: it is the afterimage
of the person who has vanished, leaving a lifeless likeness of him- or herself (2003, 148). The
corpse does not merely represent the dead, but mediates particular relationships between the
living and the dead. Harrison has eloquently deliberated on this idea and his passage deserves
a full quotation:
Certainly, there have been individuals who have experienced the first moments of death only to be revived
soon after, yet it is questionable as to whether this fleeting or temporary experience is tantamount to the
permanent and final state of death.
1
For all its grave stillness there is nothing more dynamic than a corpse. It is the event
of passage taking place before our eyes. This phenomenon of passage – from which
devolves our abstract idea of the past – makes of the unalive body a relational “thing”
which, in its subjection to the power of death, binds past, present and future. The past
(…), the present (…), and the future (…) all converge in the dead body, as long, that
is, as it remains an object of concern or solicitude for the living. Only in its
genealogical, sentimental or institutional relation to the surviving loved one does it
become the personification of transcendence (Ibid, 93).
The object of concern for the living is the image of dead – the presence that renders an
absence. And the power of images lies in the way they transcend discrete temporalities of
past, present and future, thereby allowing the dead to be reborn into objects, voices, masks,
heroes, ancestors, founders and the like (Ibid, 154). In this way the horizon of death and the
care it demands from the living is what allows human to persist in such a way that is mindful
of what has come before and what will come after.
At Çatalhöyük, people were no doubt familiar with corpses and the processes of bodily
decay. Defleshed human and animal skulls and other body parts were a notable presence in
daily life, and intramural burial practices promised the regular encounter with decayed
human remains. Certain embodied forms – separated heads and bodies, anthropomorphized
animals with navels, disarticulated claws and paws – also likely mediated such relations
between the living and the dead. In fact, many practices that involved these materials also
served to connect not only the living with the dead, but with the house and the wild as well.
In the following discussion, I will explore the theme of detached heads and other body parts
that appears across human burials, animal sculptures, figurines, placed deposits and wall
paintings. I will consider how these material practices, which engendered the dead in new
material ‘afterlives’, might have also rendered the dead as engenderers – as the authors and
proprietors of life, personifying all that transcended and yet also generated human society
(Harrison 2003, 94).
Human Remains
The treatment of certain human remains is an obvious starting point. Most of the burials
known from Çatalhöyük are located under platforms in houses, although burials under
floors, in walls or foundations and building infill are also known (Hager & Boz
forthcoming). Burials have also been found in midden contexts, but rarely. Although it was
uncommon, people sometimes removed human skulls from bodies. In many cases, this act
may have been unintentional given the practice of burying individuals under the same
platforms within the house, by which burials were disturbed by later internments. While
most skulls appear to have been removed or disturbed during these later events, there are
instances of skulls and other parts of the body being skillfully removed during or after burial.
So far the team has found 17 headless individuals and 24 skulls without bodies (Hager &
Boz forthcoming); and the latter have been found both singly and in groups. However, upon
closer scrutiny, even fewer appear to have been intentionally disarticulated. Only, seven
headless bodies (Table 1) and thirteen skulls (Table 2) show some evidence of intentional
removal.
Table 1. Headless human remains.
Feature
29
492
Skelton
1466
4593
Location
B.1
B.6
Age
adult
adult
Sex
male
male
Comments
Cut marks on hyoid
Cut marks on C1; plank over torso with
2232
3031 (=3010)
13162
16137 (=16302)
B.60
Sp. 17, FT 1
adult
Adult
female
male
4019
17412
B.49
adult
unknown
4021
6000
16697
17698
B.49
Sp. 327
Adult
Adult
female
male
other burial goods
with fetus engaged in birth canal
Cervicals in perfect anatomical order;
body belongs to 16302 in skull cluster
Also limbless; last individual buried in
house, under floor
Cervicals also missing
Table 2. Disarticulated human skulls.
Feature
n/a
n/a
n/a
1517
Skeleton
3529.1
6692
5022
11330
Location
B.3
B.3
B.17
B.42
Age
juvenile
adult
adult
adult
Sex
unknown
female
female
male
1320
1705
3010
11621
10834
16130, 16300 –
16303, 16305,
16308
B.44
B.50
Sp. 17, FT 1
infant
adult
adults
unknown
female
males and
possible males
Comments
facing 6692 in debris
Facing 3529.1 in debris
In post-retrieval pit
Plastered and painted, placed in arms
of female burial
In bench construction
In post-retrieval pit
Arranged in SE corner of multiple
burial pit
Some examples of the former include a headless adult female (13162) with a full-term fetus
(13163) in her abdominal and pelvic regions. The fetal head was engaged in the birth canal
suggesting that the woman died in childbirth; notably, this burial was the first internment in
the platform. Cut marks found on the hyoid or cervicals provide the strongest evidence for
the intentional removal of heads. Two skeletons show these markers: an adult male (1466)
buried under the floor of B.1 and another adult male (4593) from B.6. The human remains
team observed that head and atlas of 1466 were removed without disturbing the rest of the
vertebral column, which suggests that the skeleton was still partially fleshed at the time; other
indications also might suggest that the skull was forcefully twisted off (Andrews et al. 2005).
Individual 4593 underwent a rather unique burial in many respects. Somewhat atypically, he
was placed on his back with his legs flexed to the chest and open to the sides and had a
hackberry wood plank covering his torso; the body was lying on a thin layer of matting and
concentrations of red ochre were found around the upper torso and the area where the head
would have been. Cut marks on the atlas bone and a perfectly articulated hynoid bone
suggest that his head was rather skillfully removed while the body was still somewhat fleshy
(Molleson et al. 1999).
Along with headless bodies, we also find disarticulated skulls. Several occur together in burial
pits, while others occur alone (Table 2). The contexts in which skulls occur are varied and
often provocative. Two skulls were found facing each other in the debris of an abandoned
building (3529.1 and 6692). Two came from post-retrieval pits (5022 and 10834), and one
from inside a bench (11621). But perhaps the most humanized context is the plastered and
painted adult male skull (11330) found in the arms of a buried female. James Mellaart also
claimed to have found human skulls on platforms - right above the burial places of the dead
(Fig. 2).
Shrine E.VII.21 contained four well-preserved crania: one lay facing a modeled image
of a bull’s head on the room’s west wall, a second sat beneath another bull’s head in
the center of the east wall, and two were found paired together, perched on the corner
of a platform associated with a wall painting of twin vultures attacking (?) headless
corpses (Talalay 2004, 142).
This scene is especially intriguing in terms of the symbolic ‘reunification’ of headless human
bodies with human skulls. That this occurs across different materialities – wall paintings and
human remains – might also be notable.
While the removal of heads from bodies seems to be the most prevalent theme in the human
remains record, other body parts were also removed. One older individual (17412) buried in
a shallow grave in the floor of B.49 was the last individual buried in this building. His limbs
and shoulders were removed, and given the condition and context of the body, it is likely
that these body parts were removed before the individual was interred (Fig. 3). Excavators
have also found articulated limbs and other body parts in building infill (F.2231) and midden
(F.1512). Finally, a burial in B.65 (F.2604) contained the remains of two disarticulated
individuals (14507.b1 and b2) that were arranged to appear as one. An adult male (14507.b1)
was buried earlier than the adult female (14507.b2). Some parts were removed from both
skeletons and the remaining parts were assembled to appear as one individual (Boz et al.
2007, 181). The merging of two individuals in death is something we have seen before.
Burial F.1517 (mentioned above), in which a female was buried cradling a plastered male
skull does not enmesh two identities as in F.2604, but it does articulate a powerful
relationship between two individuals.
So with a small number of human remains - less than 10% - there is evidence of
disarticulating and more rarely, re-articulating body parts. Clearly, at least some of the
Neolithic people at Çatalhöyük were consistently engaging with the dead at the level of
bodily remains and there appears to have been some emphasis on separating the head from
the body.
Human Figurines
We also see the theme of detached heads in the figurine materials. Human figurines also
demonstrate a particular concern for the head and it’s detachability from the body. Roughly
forty-one percent of the 131 human figurine forms (that are more than fifty percent intact)
are missing heads, either made headless (18) or with the head broken off (36). Twenty-four
heads are also known, four of which may have had dowel holes in the base. While the heads
broken from bodies may be the result of post-depositional processes, the figurines with
dowel holes reveal an intentional desire to keep heads and bodies separate. And in the case
of one marble figurine, the head and neck were sawed off rather than broken (pers. comm.
K. Wright). Like the headless skeletons and disarticulated skulls, these objects suggest the
partability and interchangabilty of heads and bodies. And this bodily scheme gestures
towards a certain kind of mobility or fluidity concerning the human head and it’s values and
associations. As Lauren Talalay (2004: 140) writes:
the untethered head presents us with a kind of visual vocabulary or metaphor,
which, while difficult to define in our terms, appears to have encapsulated notions
about the fluid or shifting nature of identities, particularly those that persisted into
death.
Partible heads and bodies in the figurine assemblage echo those in the human remains
assemblage. We also find the headless form on Mellaart’s famous vulture wall paintings. Int
these images, the birds are depicted hovering over tiny headless human forms. Although
Mellaart used these images to support his interpretation of excarnation in burial practices
(1963), analyses of the human remains refutes this theory.
Several scholars have explored this theme of bodily disarticulation in the Neolithic human
remains records and its possible meanings (Wright 1988; Kuijt 2000; Talalay 2004; Bailey
2005; Nanoglou 2006; Verhoeven 2007; Meskell 2008; Nakamura & Meskell 2008; Nanoglou
2008). Many of these discussions focus on the perceived power of the head and it’s
separation from the body, or take on and extend Strathern’s (1988) and Chapman’s (2000)
ideas about the fractured or divided self. For instance, some researchers have argued that the
practice of disarticulating heads and bodies at Çatalhöyük suggests a fluid concept of identity
(Hamilton 1996; Voigt 2000; Hamilton 2006). Perhaps for obvious reasons, heads rather
than bodies are more readily associated with wisdom, power, personhood and identity and
these values are often viewed as remaining with the head when it becomes separated from
the body.
However, as Lynn Meskell and I have argued elsewhere (Nakamura & Meskell 2009), bodily
forms do not always or necessarily mediate concerns about identity. And moreover,
disarticulation can also suggest implicit connection rather than rupture and severance. Even
as the severed head becomes susceptible to new manipulations, it posits a basic relation to
it’s absent body. So while one might reinscribe a skull with new values and associations apart
from its former life attached to a specific body and being, these gestures may serve to
combine, and intensify rather than supercede older forms and associations. This caveat
might be especially relevant in terms of mediating relations between the living and the dead.
At Çatalhöyük, the headless body may have remained in the realm of the dead, while the
head rentered the realm of the living, but it is likely that a connection between the two
remained. Furthermore, it was through these displaced and transfigured embodiments that
connection was forged and maintained. As Talalay (2004, 156) reminds us, “for many
cultures, fragmenting the body at the neck is not necessarily connected to the notion of
death, but rather to the concept of continuity and rebirth.”
Animal Installations
The situation would seem to be slightly different for the disarticulated but more immobilized
animal bucrania installations, which are fixed to walls and features in buildings. The cattle
bucrania mounted on pilasters, benches and walls are a well known visual trope associated
with the site (Fig. 4). Unlike the figurines, these mounted installations were immobile, at least
during the lifetime of a building. However, excavations commonly find horn cores
dismantled and left on the floors of abandoned buildings. Given the regular occurrence and
strategic positions of retrieval pits, Hodder (2006, with Cessford 2004) has suggested that it
is also possible that people remembered and retrieved these along with other materials at a
later date, allowing the forging of links to particular pasts.
Notably, many of these skull installations are plastered. Lynn Meskell (2008) has discussed
the symbolic and physical association of using plaster to ‘re-flesh’ these animals and its
potentially transformative and revivifying properties. She argues that certain plastering
activities may have been a material strategy to render durable and permanent that which
succumbs to frailties of the flesh (2008, 381-2). So while animals were consumed as meat
and some of their bones used and refashioned as tools, certain body parts were reconstituted
somewhat differently in the household context. At Çatalhöyük, both human and animal
remains have been found embedded in or covered with plaster. Plaster does occur in some
burials, although rather ephemerally, and there is one instance of a plastered human skull
(11330). Three cattle scapulae were found embedded in a plaster feature (F.155) in B.3, a
bear paw was found covered in plaster (3603), and in the 1960s, Mellaart noted examples of
teeth, claws and vulture beeks embedded in the walls and plastered over numerous times
leaving protuberances interpreted as ‘breasts’: ‘In the upper breast was placed the skull of a
fox, in the lower that of a weasel’ (Mellaart 1963, 66; see also Russell and McGowan 2003
for further discussion).
Many ‘invisible’ practices concerning animal remains, especially the incorporation of skulls,
scapula, claws and consumed remains into the building (Russell & Martin 2005), also
underscore the connection between the house and wild animals. The bucrania installations
all come from wild species (Russell & Meece 2006) and it is likely that the scapulae,
mandibles and claws found in various house deposits also come from wild species.
Elsewhere, Peter Pels and I have written about the magical character of such deposits (Pels
& Nakamura forthcoming). However, the more general aspect of their physical
incorporation or embedding into house features may have forged a more straight-forward
connection between domestic and wild arenas or natural and cultural worlds. These acts of
incorporation are especially evocative since their original form is concealed, unlike the cattle,
sheep and goat head installations that visually dominated the space. Visible or invisible, these
animal parts, like humans, were materially incorporated into the house structure (walls,
platforms, etc) or ‘skin’ (plastered surfaces), and literally became part of the building itself.
These linkages to the house can also be seen in the recent excavation B.77. Here, excavators
found two horned pedestals tightly enclosing a platform, under which human burials were
likely interned (House & Yeomans forthcoming). Above the platform on the wall stood a
plastered ram’s head with a niche underneath. Again, we have human and animal remains
inhabiting the same space and literally attached to or embedded in the house.
The constellation of images and materials consisting of disembodied human heads, headless
bodies and animals in houses poses a difficult problem to interpret. However as Jonathan
Last reminds us, at the very least these disarticulated images and materialities served to
mediate complex relationships between the living and the dead (Last 2006). Moreover, I
would
The Navel
The final theme I’d like to discuss here is the emphasis on the navel found across both
human and animal forms. The navel has been found depicted on splayed plastered figures,
figurines and an animal stamp seal (Fig. 5). Mellaart initially interpreted the splayed forms as
the ‘mother goddess’, but since a 2005 finding of a stamp seal (11652.X1) quite clearly
depicting a more animal than human form, Ian Hodder’s team has reinterpreted these
figurines as depicting bears. We do find bear claws in the archaeological record and an earlier
finding of a bear paw covered in plaster (3603) has prompted some to suggest that actual
bear claws may have been part of these splayed figures.
Returning to the navel, in a literal sense, the navel is an external, visual marker and trace of
the link between the living and the unborn. Therefore, it may be connected to ideas of
birthing as a cultural concern and the connection between generations that may extend
beyond offspring to producing ancestors, both in a literal and symbolic sense. Moreover, the
navel is a distinctly human trait. The presence of a navel on animal forms, may again be
articulating some kind of link, not just between the living and dead, but also the human and
animal. It is significant that, while in theory all mammals (with the exception of
monotremes) are born connected to the placenta by way of an umbilical cord, most do not
bear the visible mark of a navel. Such a mark is the trace the connection to one’s mother, her
protective and life-giving capacities specifically, but also to one’s progenitors, more generally.
The navel and its attendant qualities has been mytholgized and abstracted in many world
cultures. Concepts such as the ‘navel of the world’ (omphalos) or axis mundi connect various
earthly and supernatural realms. Importantly, the navel is the center of the world, a known
point of origin and the conduit for communication between realms (Eliade 1991, 46-7). The
navel, then, is a visible reminder that one comes from someone and somewhere; it creates a
link from generation to generation, a link that both constitutes and protects a family, a social
group or even way of life.
A focus on depicting the navel may articulate an idea of genealogical connection. This
concern for connecting ancestors to the living and unborn may also have compelled people
to bury the dead within the house. Giambattista Vico, when contemplating the earliest
origins of the ancient house in his seminal work, The New Science (1725), concluded that the
house was not merely a residence but an “institution that linked the living to the dead, the
dead to the unborn and the family to its native ground” (Harrison 2003, 25).
The house was a primary concern for the Neolithic people at Çatalhöyük. Hodder (2006)
and other notable scholars (see especially contributions by Hodder, Hodder & Meskell,
Bloch, and Hodder and Pels in Hodder 2010) have deliberated on the ways we might
understand Çatalhöyük as a ‘house society’ (Levi-Strauss 1982). These houses brought
everything into them, as it were (Hodder 2006, 58), and in many ways these households took
on lives and histories of their own. The abovementioned practices of interning the dead
humans in platforms and foundations, installing animals skulls in rooms and embedding
animal parts in walls and other features do not only mark various decisions that constituted
the building and rebuilding of the house, but all constitute something of the life of the house
itself.
Materializing empathy
Given this brief review of certain embodied forms and spaces that received a distinct kind of
attention at Çatalhöyük, we might be poised to further consider how these embodiments
figured in the lives and practices of the Neolithic community. While the following discussion
must remain speculative, I would like to try to think through the possibility that these
practices of bodily disarticulation, manipulation and representation were entangled in the
constitution of supernatural agents, namely ancestors and the dead.
There are numerous ancient and modern examples of dead spirits and supernatural beings animate yet non-living things - acquiring or using material bodies in order to act, to become
present and efficacious. These bodies are pre-made, both literally and figuratively, as they
must be in some way, to use again Latour’s language, already affected, already sensitive to the
world as humans experience it. In other words, they come to inhabit bodies that are already
socialized, and are thus able to affect and be affected. For the disembodied, a bodily form
facilitates a more intimate and inclusive participation in a social world. For instance, consider
the figure of the splayed bear at Çatalhöyük; we might read this recurrent figure as positing a
form that not only combines the various traits, associations, agencies of both humans and
bears, but converges their specific histories and genealogies as well.
Similarly the detached skulls and bodies may distribute or extend linkages from the ancestors
or the dead to the living. It is possible that people interacted with skulls and bucrania in
living spaces in specific ways, treating them as embodiments of ancestors or beings with
specific powers and needs. Such practices imply a shared knowledge - of what the ancestors
need or demand and how humans can fulfill them. But embodiments of supernatural agents
also defy the physical limitations living bodies. So while supernatural forms often obey
biosocial laws (such as requiring food, clothing, and care; being subject to desires and
emotions) they appear to transcend certain physical laws (being immortal, multipresent, or
being able to move through solid matter). The former make reference to an absent yet vital
and demanding body, one that has needs similar to living social beings, while the latter
establishes supernatural or divine agents in spirit and form as distinctly more than just
human or just animal; this is what Harrison might call the ‘personification of transcendence’
(see above).
In this way, disarticulated and hybrid bodies fulfill the dual requirement of having the
capacity to participate in a social world (as an embodied form) while not being subject to the
same physical limits of living and dying bodies thus giving them a sense of special power.
Contra Julian Thomas (2000, 662) who has characterized the dead as remaining actively
involved in the production of social relationships, but as no longer being social agents, I
would argue that the dead at Çatalhöyük, as ancestral figures, were indeed social agents.
Moreover, I suspect that this agency was made possible by the taking on of particular bodily
forms. There is a basic understanding that agency, the ability to produce an effect in the
world, requires a physical body or medium to act through. Likewise, sociality demands the
ability to connect with other beings and structures in a shared world. The bodily forms of
disarticulated skulls, headless bodies and claws and anthropomorphized animals fulfill both
of these requirements. And their capacity to blur subject-object and human-nature
boundaries makes them highly amenable to materializing supernatural agency and power.
Finally, I’d like to end by returning to the idea of empathy, an idea, incidentally, which is
explored by the science-fiction/philosopher Philip K Dick. Empathy, as the capacity to
share and feel in another’s experience, is perhaps key to understanding why humans include
embodiments of spirits and ancestors in their social worlds. In his well known work, Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Dick imagines an empathy box, a device which allows
dispersed and isolated humans to reconnect to the rest of humanity (Dick 1996, 66): he
writes, "An empathy box," ... "is the most personal possession you have. It's an extension of
your body; it's the way you touch other humans, it's the way you stop being alone.” Here I
think Dick gets at the core of human sociality: empathy as the power of connection, the
possibility of shared experience, the capacity to get into the skin of another, as it were. As
such, the idea of empathy allows for a subtle but important shift in the way we might
imagine human relations to the dead or supernatural in the past. In many archaeological
discussions of powerful non-human bodies and objects, even in the theoretically rich
discussions of Neolithic skulls and body practices mentioned earlier, there remains an
underlying functionalist framework at work that still views social behavior in terms of
humans wanting to possess, extract and/or control power. But imagining these kinds of
complex relations through the trope of empathy turns this functionalist framework on its
side and presents a potentially productive shift in considering various relations and
formations of power and agency in the past.
Perhaps embodying the dead was not (just) about the control of power, but about the fusing
of desires with histories, the past with the present. The idea of empathy places focus on what
becomes possible when people share in a common experience. P.K. Dick describes how, by
way of clutching the two handles of the empathy box, John Isidore can experience
something beyond himself:
He had crossed over in the usual perplexing fashion; physical merging —
accompanied by mental and spiritual identification — with Wilbur Mercer had
reoccurred. As it did for everyone who at this moment clutched the handles, either
here on Earth or on one of the colony planets. He experienced them, the others,
incorporated the babble of their thoughts, heard in his own brain the noise of their
many individual existences. They — and he — cared about one thing; this fusion of their
mentalities oriented their attention on the hill, the climb, the need to ascend (Dick 1996,
22, added emphasis).
At Çatalhöyük, the fusion of human and animal, dead and living did not only occur through
embodied objects – skeletal remains and bodily forms – but, as argued above, also through
the house itself. Hodder describes the house as seamlessly religious, social and practical;
moreover, he suggests that death was central to the creation of social life at this moment in
time given the importance of ancestors in the founding of houses. Foundation burials or
deposits containing human remains often marked the building of a new house. And
throughout a house’s life, human corpses and animal body parts were incorporated into its
surfaces and features. The fusion of humans to animals and houses was thus a physical one.
Notably, it was the dead – specifically their material remains and images – that mediated this
connection. If the materialities of death constitute the house as a space that personifies
transcendence, then this space is one of human-ancestor cohabitation rather than human
subjugation. At least, the spatial-material grammar of power in the house does not suggest
that humans worshiped idols and deities. Rather it suggests a kind of fusion and contact
through shared genealogical past. Almost certainly, the past and the dead were a resource of
power in the Neolithic, and humans accessed this power by merging experiences of life and
death through embodiments in and of the house. It was, in a sense, the house as empathy
box.
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