Word: mellaart
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...look at the bulging buttocks of the squat female figurine and British Archaeologist James Mellaart recognized a Stone Age fertility symbol; the dig he was starting on a plain in southern Turkey promised to open a door onto the most ancient reaches of human civilization. Mellaart treated every crum bling bit of dirt as a hard-to-read book, and after three years of diligent scratching through the 32-acre mound called Qatal Hiiyiik, he is now piecing together the story of a city that flourished at least 3,000 years before the first Pharaoh ruled in Egypt...
...with strange and intricate paintings almost too faint to be seen. Painted gods and goddesses emerged from lumps of clay, and scraps of charcoal-like material turned out to be the remnants of food that the ancient people ate, pieces from clothes they wore. By putting the pieces together, Mellaart reports in the latest journal of the British Institute of Archaeology, at Ankara, what he has learned about how people worked and played and worshiped at Çatal Hiiytik 80 centuries...
Rouge in the Rubble. Hacilar, now reduced to little more than a farmer's field, has 16 building levels, one on top of another. Digging down to the sixth level of rubble. Mellaart, who has roamed the Anatolian Plateau off and on for a decade, found the remains of brick houses with windows, double doors, walls three feet thick and carefully constructed staircases leading to a second story. The discovery of grinding platforms and storage bins for wheat, barley, peas and lentils convinced Mellaart that the Late Neolithic inhabitants of Hacilar were successful farmers who probably had domesticated cattle...
...people were remarkably advanced. The tools of work were stone chisels and sickles, made of polished deer antlers and fitted with hard flint blades. The tools of war were sling-stones and maces with heads of blue-veined marble. Hacilar's women had their own sort of weapons: Mellaart found obsidian pendants and bracelets made of fossil shells, as well as lumps of red ocher that were presumably ground into a kind of rouge...
...Great Mother. In the last days of the six weeks of excavation, Mellaart's team of 40 Turkish workmen uncovered what he considers the expedition's most "revolutionary" find: a group of 40 female clay statuettes, all of the Asian Great Mother goddess, but naturalistically carved in a variety of poses. They show the deity as a young girl and mature woman, lying down, squatting asleep with a child on her lap and seated on a leopard throne. Some of the figurines have grotesquely exaggerated pendulous breasts and normally proportioned thighs and buttocks; others reverse the goddess...