Cultural Policy Yearbook 2022-2023 Resilience in the Ecosystem of Theatre

Making Policy for Cultural Heritage: The Example of Çatalhöyük¹

Prof. Ian Hodder

02.06.2022

I am very much an archaeologist who believes in the importance of cultural heritage but who got involved through the sites that I have been excavating. I am going to discuss about some of the lessons that I feel I learned along the way as I became more and more involved into the whole issue of cultural heritage management and policy-making.

Çatalhöyük… I just want to briefly say something about the history of the work there. Çatalhöyük was first excavated in the 1960s by James Mellaart. He found some of the very iconic findings and then he ran into a series of difficult scandals that led to his no longer being able to excavate or work in Turkey. The site was abandoned from 1965 onwards.

At the time our project started in 1993, there was a lot of erosion and collapse of walls and buildings, and lots of paintings and sculptures were just falling off the walls and lying in a great heap at the bottom of the sections that he had left. Even though the site was well known internationally, there was nothing there to visit, and were few to no visitors. When we began working that year, one of the main tasks that were set us by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism was to build some sort of infrastructure and to create a heritage site that could indeed be visited and could attract tourism.

One of the things that we did was to build a dig house and visitor centre, which has a space for about 100 researchers to live and 12 laboratories for different specialists so that people can work in an integrated way at the site. And over the two main excavation areas, we have constructed shelters. Having the shelters allowed people to visit Çatalhöyük throughout the year, so the site became accessible during the entire year and this greatly increased the number of visitors – the tourists – over the years. So, in doing this I was increasingly aware of the need to develop some sort of policy, some sort of management plan. A series of institutions, not only the Ministry but also the European Union from whom we got funds and UNESCO – I will come back to UNESCO later on – really forced that on us in any case. But all of these required us to produce management plans and to come up with some sort of policy. So, it’s within that framework that I am going to be talking.

For me, I guess the main policy aim was to somehow contribute to the local community and to somehow engage the local community in Çatalhöyük in such a way that benefited them. Training local people near Konya on the Anatolian Plateau, bringing them to the site, educating them, involving them in our conservation, and so on, were all very much part of it. And over the years that remained the main focus. But it became clear that was not a simple aim and that the policy aims of trying to support and assist local communities were very much at odds with many of the intentions and policies of the other people who might be around the heritage table. I never managed to get everybody to sit around a table, but the local communities were what my focus was and it was a matter of how to relate them to these other groups, particularly the archaeologists, the government, UNESCO, tourists, and the media. I guess the sort of challenge is, Is it possible to support local communities in terms of heritage given these other conflicting interests?

As I said, one of the other stakeholders around the heritage table is the archaeologists. During the 25 years of the project, the techniques that we use changed quite dramatically. When we started in the 1990s, the archaeology team was still working through using paper, plans, pencils, and pens to record what we were finding, make drawings of them, and so on. By the time we finished at the end of the period – so this was in 2016, 2017, and 2018 – everything had gone digital. There was no more paper, it was all paperless and everything was recorded digitally. One of the effects of this is that the amount of knowledge that you needed to excavate the Çatalhöyük increased exponentially. In order to use tablets, for example, you needed to be able to use GIS and various types of database software and it just took a lot of training that was very difficult. It was a wonderful technique, and the archaeology was a lot better, but it was much more specialised and difficult. One of the effects of this was it became more or less impossible for the local community to be involved in what we were doing. The level of education that you needed was the university level or higher in order to get into these systems. Just this process creates a conflict. We’re trying to involve the local community and engage them in what we do, but the methods that we’re using are becoming so complex and difficult that the local community is excluded from engagement.

One way of showing locals’ exclusion from engagement is the work that was done by Allison Mickel. She used a network analysis software in order to show the linkages between the members of the archaeological team. She looked at how members of the team reference each other on their recording sheets when they say “I learned this from somebody”, “someone else takes this” or “I read this and that”. And so, they are referring to each other in all the recording that we are doing, and when someone refers to someone else, Allison Mickel draws a line between those two people. When the analysis finished, there were two clouds. The main cloud is the main team – the foreign and Turkish team of specialists – whereas the local community is largely separated off. Their connections with each other, what they write and do, the pictures that they appear together in, and so on, any connection that can be made is really quite separate, and this is something that didn’t exist in the beginning. It is something that developed through time in the end. We struggled to find a way of integrating the community fully into the research process. The attempt to engage the local community was frustrated by the way the archaeologists are nowadays working, with advanced forensic and digital technologies. So, there is a conflict that is emerging around the heritage table.

One of the other stakeholders is, of course, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Turkish State generally. Increasingly over time, the ministry controlled what we were doing and managed in a very detailed way how the archaeological work was done. And this is normal. This is the way that one finds in most nation-states and one of the very positive things that the ministry did was to promote Çatalhöyük onto the UNESCO World Heritage List. This was achieved in 2012. You might have thought that this process of going onto the UNESCO list would be an important way in which the community would have a voice. And this is because the UNESCO process itself mandates that there is dialogue and discussion, with all the stakeholder groups including the local community.

And so, that did happen. There have been several papers written about this, and someone did a Ph.D. at Stanford on this process. That study argued that the whole process of negotiating and engaging with the community lacked real substance. The meetings that were supposed to take place didn’t take place, the local community voices were not listened to, and the mukhtar of the village was not involved properly. In fact, the local community felt excluded by the whole process. So, this should have been a way in which things were brought together but, in practice, the local community again felt excluded by the way the UNESCO system actually worked. The engagement was a formality and did not involve any substantive taking into account the views of the local community.

Nevertheless, the engagement with the ministry and their promotion onto the World Heritage List all helped to increase the visibility of Çatalhöyük in terms of the media and the public. Certainly, it helped to increase the number of visitors. Over the years there have been many celebrities who came to visit as a result of this. But celebrity Çatalhöyük had very little to do with any real impact on the local community. These people fly in and out and they don’t really have any engagement at all with the local community. That’s generally true of tourism in Çatalhöyük as a whole. People are bussing in and out, and they are not allowed to stop at the local shops and so on. They just come and go, there’s no real impact. Superficial media and tourist attention have an impact on the global stage, but they have limited impact on the local community. Studies that look at the income gained by the local community, local shops, bus companies, taxi companies, and so on find little impact from this type of engagement.

The publicity does have some positive aspects to it. For example, one of the houses at Çatalhöyük was reconstructed using virtual reality. It’s nice to do these sorts of things, these virtual reality constructions. They are very engaging and interesting. There have been very good exhibits about this aspect of Çatalhöyük, one in the Yapı Kredi gallery in Istiklal Street and the other in ANAMED that used the computer generated art of Refik Anadol. These do allow a broader audience to be reached and help people to visualise Çatalhöyük in a way that it’s very difficult to do when you are actually at the site because, unlike the stone circles and art at Göbeklitepe, the mud brick buildings at Çatalhöyük are more difficult to understand. For this reason, these sorts of reconstructions are very valuable. And, there are lots of fun ways that you can interact with the data of Çatalhöyük using these sorts of technologies. But although we did bring some members of the local community to Istanbul to see the ANAMED exhibit, they do not benefit locally much from such events.

Another community that we can talk about where there is been conflict between their interests and those of the local community is the “mother goddess” people. Some figurines that we found at Çatalhöyük are often called mother goddesses. We have lots of people who come to Çatalhöyük as a part of their cultic activity to search for the mother goddess or to feel her presence. These are people mainly from California or Germany. Well, there are actually quite a lot from Istanbul. They come to pray, worship, and remember the mother goddess. It has led me to some unusual experiences and probably I am the only archaeologist who has stood on a catwalk and introduced a fashion show. This was the fashion show of Bahar Korçan in Istanbul some years ago where she developed a line of clothing that was inspired in a loose way by Çatalhöyük. It was a big event related to the mother goddess idea and led to a lot of global publicity.