By SUSANNE FOWLER<\/p>\n
Published: September 7, 2011<\/p>\n
CATALHOYUK, TURKEY \u2014 A pair of space-age shelters rising from the beet and barley fields of the flat Konya Plain are the first clue to the Catalhoyuk Research Project, where archaeologists are excavating a 9,000-year-old Neolithic village.<\/p>\n
Dig Site in Turkey Reveals an Ancient People\u2019s Handiwork<\/p>\n
The experts, armed with scalpels, gingerly scraped away micro-layers of white plaster from a wall deep in the dig last month to reveal what the project director, the British archaeologist Ian Hodder, called a \u201cvery exciting\u201d and \u201cparticularly intriguing\u201d painting with deep reds and reddish oranges thought to be made with red ochre and cinnabar.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were taking off many, many layers of plaster and we have a program where a joint team of Turkish and British conservators try to take them off one by one, so it\u2019s extremely slow-going,\u201d Dr. Hodder said this week by telephone.<\/p>\n
\u201cI got called over to where they were working because they saw some paint. The pattern initially didn\u2019t look like very much: We often find just specks of paint or a wall of all-red paint. But this time it gradually emerged that this was a complete painting, and the best preserved painting that I\u2019ve ever seen at Catalhoyuk, with wonderfully fresh, bright colors and very neat lines.\u201d<\/p>\n
Word of the discovery spread quickly through the international team on site as more of the painting was exposed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is by far the most intricate and elaborate painting we have found during our excavations here since the mid-90s,\u201d Dr. Hodder said. \u201cWe\u2019ve been waiting quite a long time for something so elaborate.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Stone Age paintings don\u2019t come with labels explaining what they are.<\/p>\n
\u201cAn interesting aspect of some of the paintings at Catal,\u201d Dr. Hodder said, \u201cis that they are very enigmatic and full of ambiguity and difficult to read.<\/p>\n
via Into the Stone Age With a Scalpel – A Dig With Clues on Early Urban Life – NYTimes.com<\/span>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By SUSANNE FOWLER Published: September 7, 2011 CATALHOYUK, TURKEY \u2014 A pair of space-age shelters rising from the beet and barley fields of the flat Konya Plain are the first clue to the Catalhoyuk Research Project, where archaeologists are excavating a 9,000-year-old Neolithic village. Dig Site in Turkey Reveals an Ancient People\u2019s Handiwork The experts, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":51702,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2939],"tags":[5651,6054],"class_list":["post-43667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cultureart","tag-antiquities","tag-catalhoyuk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43667\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}