The Baby in the Brick: A More-Than-Representational Approach to Architectural Action and Intramural Burial at Çatalhöyük

Abstract

This article reconsiders the association, common globally and ubiquitous in Neolithic Turkey, between dead bodies and domestic architecture. Residential burial has conventionally been handled in a representational framework. Buildings’ physical and meaningful aspects are analytically separated, so that they can act as ‘containers of meaning’ in funerary contexts and as concrete technologies in others. Here, a provocative dataset challenges this separation: infant bodies and curated remains buried against the bases of unstable Çatalhöyük walls, as if to reinforce them. Rather than asking what such bodies meant, I adopt a more-than-representational approach inspired by Mol’s (2002) ‘enacting ontology’ and Barad’s (2007) ‘agential realism’ that asks what bodies could do. Doing so extracts bodies and walls from separate domains of mortuary and mechanical action, and asks how they were enacted as objects within Neolithic practice. I trace practices that enacted walls and bodies in Neolithic worlds – making walls’ futures responsive to subsurface burial. This example raises broader implications for the way archaeologists investigate spatial aspects of mortuary practice, and mortuary aspects of architecture, and more broadly the way we determine what the objects of our study are.

Acknowledgements

This research sometimes wobbled and was supported by broad social networks. Special thanks are owed to Scott Haddow, Marek Barański, Marianne Hem Eriksen, Oliver Harris, Jess Thompson, Rachel Crellin, and anonymous reviewers who read it in various iterations. It grows out of PhD research funded by the Cambridge Trust, with constant support from the Çatalhöyük Research Project. Any lingering instability remains my own responsibility.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Where remains contacted walls in a corner, data reflect traits in either wall; the two walls count as one in my calculations.

² There is no direct skeletal evidence for violence on deposited infants; however, infanticide rarely leaves skeletal damage (cf. Eriksen 2017). It is worth noting that Moses (2008) and Carter’s et al.’s (2015) accounts are not mutually exclusive.

³ This was suggested to me by Prof Douglas Baird (pers. comm. at PhD viva, 06.2020).