The aim of this volume is to present an interdisciplinary study of the role of spirituality and religious ritual in the emergence of complex societies, involving natural scientists, archaeologists, anthropologists, philosophers and theologians in a novel, field-based context. Throughout the project, from 2006 to 2008, members convened at Çatalhöyük in central Turkey for a week each summer and also met in seminars at Stanford University. At the site they talked with the field team and spent time in the specialist laboratories discussing ways in which the data from the site could inform the main questions addressed by the project. Toward the end of the project, members undertook to write chapters for this volume, either singly or in collaboration. The volume presented here resulted from this experiment in bringing scholars from diverse backgrounds to work with archaeologists ‘at the trowel's edge’ at Çatalhöyük. During our discussions it became clear that many participants would prefer to place the terms ‘religion’ and ‘civilization’ in the book's title in quotation marks, as will be described later in this chapter and in Chapter 12. But whatever the difficulties with these terms and the lack of interdisciplinary agreement about their use, productive interactions took place that provided new insights into the interpretation of both Çatalhöyük and the Neolithic in Anatolia and the Middle East.

Introduction to the project

For about 140,000 years before the start of the Holocene, anatomically modern humans lived in small groups of relatively mobile hunter-gatherers. Then in a relatively short time after 12,000 BC, human groups began to settle down, adopt agriculture and take many of the steps that we associate with ‘civilization’. The reasons given for this shift have predominantly been climatic change, population increase and economic and ecological factors, although social and cognitive factors have increasingly been included (Bender 1978; Hayden 1990; Renfrew 1998). The aim of the proposed study is to explore the extent to which spiritual life and religious ritual played a role in this momentous shift.