It is difficult to make general comments about processes of Neolithization and cultural change in Europe and the Middle East given the increasingly strong evidence for regional diversity, even at two ends of one valley (e.g. the Struma valley as discussed by Lichardus-Itten). Many of the authors in this volume argue that the spread of the Neolithic from the Middle East through Anatolia and into the Balkans and Europe was a complex and locally diverse process involving migration, exchange, diffusion and autochthonous development. Such arguments confound commentaries that seek overall themes and consistencies (as argued by Bleda Düring). “The Neolithic” has become such an enormously long period and there is so much going on at different times, at different rates and in different ways locally that any attempt to build a grand narrative seems doomed. At the level of grand narrative, evolutionary and migrationist views have returned to dominate the discourse (as claimed by Schier), but for many archaeologists (as opposed to biologists or linguists) the details of the stops and starts in the spread of various aspects of the Neolithic require contextual understanding (e.g. regarding Arbuckle and Makarewicz’ 2009 discussion of the delayed adoption of domestic cattle in central Anatolia).

Over recent years, a number of scholars have argued that the human mind underwent a cognitive revolution in the Neolithic. This book seeks to test these claims at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey and in other Neolithic contexts in the Middle East. The volume brings together cognitive scientists who have developed theoretical frameworks for the study of cognitive change, archaeologists who have conducted research into cognitive change in the Neolithic of the Middle East, and the excavators of the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, who have over recent years been exploring changes in consciousness, creativity, and self in the context of the rich data from the site.

One of the paradoxes of Çatalhöyük is that every time we excavate a new house we know approximately what we will find: we know roughly where the hearth and oven will be, where the burials will be, where the ladder entry will be, how much plaster will be on the main room and side-room walls, where we will find obsidian caches, and so on. And as we empty out the fill and come down onto the floors we always do find more or less what we are expecting. The rules are always followed to some degree: the northern floors are clean and white, the southern mixed with residues of cooking and production, whole pots are never found in burials, neither are whole animals. And yet, at the same time, every house is different; we are always surprised by the specifics of how things are arranged. A human body is found sprawled on a house floor, with its head removed, a sheep is found in a burial (although not quite because separated from the human body by a mat), in some cases we find the oven moved to the north part of the main room. The paradox of Çatalhöyük is that it stands out from many other sites because of the strict rule-bound repetition of houses tightly packed together in apparent conformity and order, while at the same time the site stands out as one of the great early flowerings of human creativity.