Turkey - Cafer Höyük

In the last twenty years, new excavations in the south-east of Anatolia have considerably altered our perception of the earliest Neolithic agro-pastoral societies. In this region, the only contributions to our knowledge were made by the excavations of Çayönü Tepesi in the Upper Tigris until the 1980s, when excavations at Cafer Höyük, Boy Tepe and Nevala Çori revealed the wealth and diversity of Taurus PPNB. In this context, the excavations at Cafer Höyük, which are managed with an exceptional interdisciplinary perspective, have replenished the wealth of information on economic practices and the technological systems of the earliest inhabitants of the area. More recently, the excavation sites at Göbekli Tepe, Akarçay Tepe and Tell Eilat, in the Upper Euphrates, has provided a source of considerable additional knowledge of the pre-pottery Neolithic and the transition to pottery Neolithic. Göbekli, in particular, has unveiled a hitherto unexpected symbolic and artistic universe at the time of transition from the 10th to the 9th millennia BC.

The presence of obsidian at pre-pottery Neolithic sites in Levant and Mesopotamia, several hundred kilometres away from the earliest archaeological discoveries, has been apparent for a number of years. Since the 1960s, the presence over vast distances of this volcanic glass, still considered a semi-precious stone, enabled C. Renfrew to illustrate the problem of the first prehistoric exchanges and to create a model of the same. Numerous chemical analyses conducted at the instigation of M.-C. Cauvin have shown that the first obsidian to circulate was Cappadocian obsidian. Although it reached Levant in the 11th millennium BC, it only began to mostly widely circulate in the second stage of the pre-pottery Neolithic (PPNB), more specifically at the end of the 9th and in the first few centuries of the 8th millennium BC, a period that corresponds to the first dissemination of Neolithic ways of life outside the nuclear zone.

The most recent works of the Mission have shown that obsidian was probably widely used over vast distances during the pre-pottery Neolithic period by expert artisans. Their technical traditions bore a resemblance to those of the former PPNB of the Levant Corridor and upper valleys, and not to those of groups of Epipaleolithic hunter-gatherers of central Anatolia, contemporaries of these first uses. The study of tool production methods in Aşıklı Höyük, the first known village in central Anatolia dating back to the beginning of the 8th millennium, bears witness to a possible crossing of these two traditions and the emergence of an original culture, of which Çatal Höyük is the jewel in the crown.