Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (122 page)

An underground cemetery comprising a complex of passageways, burial niches, and recessed chambers cut into the living rock. Established during imperial times in Rome, the catacombs later came to be closely associated with the burial places of Christian and Jewish communities. The name was first applied to the example in Rome and then extended in its meaning to include all similar structures.

 
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A major subdivision of the Bronze Age
KURGAN CULTURE
of southern Russia and the Ukrainian steppes that is characterized by the use of so-called catacomb graves. Dating to the period
c.
2600–2200 bc, these are not catacombs in the Roman sense, but rather buried deposits in a niche cut into the side of a shaft excavated into the ground. Following the deposition of the corpse and associated grave goods the shaft was refilled and a round barrow (
KURGAN
) built over the top.

 
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A decorated wooden platform on which a sarcophagus was temporarily placed before burial.

 
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A large Neolithic tell standing on the edge of the Konya Plain near Çumra in south central Turkey. Extensive excavations have taken place in the East Mound at the site, first by James Mellaart between 1961 and 1964 and more recently since 1993 by Ian Hodder and a large international team. The East Mound covers about 13.5ha and has 20m of stratified deposits dating to between 6400 bc and 5600 bc. From at least 6300 bc Çatal Hüyük seems to have been a village of mud-brick houses, each built to a fairly standard plan with a kitchen living room and storage area spread over about 25 square metres. The houses were built against one another with no streets or courtyards in between, suggesting that access was through the roof. Built-in furniture includes benches and platforms. Some houses had painted and relief ornamentation on the walls that included bull motifs and stylized images of a human female, in some cases giving birth. Stylized bulls heads (bucrania) were on the walls of some rooms. Burials under the floor were common, those in the highly decorated houses often being accompanied by precious objects. Mellaart argued that the decorated houses were shrines, but this view is not shared by Hodder and later writers.
Economic evidence shows that cereals were cultivated and that cattle, perhaps locally domesticated, made up 90 per cent of the animal bone assemblage. Sheep and goats were hunted and may have been domesticated in the later levels. Woodworking, weaving, obsidian working, and perhaps some incipient metalworking in copper and lead are represented. The inhabitants of the settlement had extensive trading links with western Asia. Bull horns and cattle motifs have such a prominent place that they must have been highly significant in the belief systems and ideology of the population, together with the so-called ‘mother goddess’.
[Sum.: J. Mellaart , 1967,
Catal Hoyuk, a Neolithic town in Anatolia
. London: Thames & Hudson. I. Hodder (ed.), 1996,
On the surface: Çatalhüyük 1993–95
. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research]

 
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A mathematical theory developed by René Thom that is concerned with modelling non-linear interactions within systems that can produce sudden and dramatic effects from apparently small changes in one variable. It is argued that there is only a limited number of ways in which such changes can take place. Colin Renfrew has taken what may be referred to as elementary catastrophes as models with which to explore major changes in the archaeological record, for example the collapse of Mycenaean Greece and the end of the Roman empire.

 
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