Human Impact Stories From Çatalhöyük

Candemir Zoroglu
Candemir Zoroglu joined us in 2002 as a student from Selcuk University and continued as part of the team and came until 2006. During that time he gradually gained in expertise and confidence and we were able to give him tasks with increasing degrees of responsibility. By the end of 2006 he was a well trained field archaeologist with a wide range of skills at his disposal. He went on to work for the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Ankara and is now part of the team that deals with the illicit trade in antiquities from Turkey, often traveling to major museums and governments around the world to argue Turkey’s case.

Mavili Tokyasun
Mavili Tokyasun worked as part of our kitchen and dig house staff from 1994 to 2007. She became a central part of all our lives and her keen sense of fun sustained us through many long summers. She came from the small village, Kucukkoy, near the site and had little income. The experience and financial independence she gained through working in the kitchen gave her the skills to set up her own business. She now supplies local shops in Konya with the Turkish pastry called borek. During the busy ramadan months she employs two helpers. Moving to Konya also means that her son is getting more and better education.

Sadrettin Dural
And finally there is Sadrettin Dural. He was a farmer from the village of Kucukkoy near the site although he had also worked in other jobs, such as taxi driving, to supplement his income. In the 1990s he worked as one of the guards at the site. He did not speak English and felt frustrated by his inability to explain the site to tourists. He took it on himself to learn English - from tapes, from us, and from tourists. He asked to know more about the site and I and Ayfer Bartu spent several happy evenings explaining the details of the Neolithic and of Catalhoyuk to him. As he got to know the site he felt that he would like to write his own book about the site and about the project. We gave him a computer and he sat down and wrote 50,000 words in Turkish, which were then edited and translated into English by Duygu Camurcuoglu Cleere. In the United States this book was published in 2006 by Left Coast Press as ‘Protecting Catalhoyuk. Memoir of a site guard.’ It has been favourably reviewed - including in American Anthropologist. It is, as far as I am aware, the first time that a ‘local’ worker or guard has written about his experience and become an international author.