Discuss the evolving interpretation of the significance of the female figurines discovered at Çatalhöyük, Turkey, as represented by Ian Hodder’s revision of Sir James Mellaart’s original thesis

Question

Please provide the best answer for the statement.

Answer 1

1. Following his excavations in 1958, Sir James Mellaart concluded that Çatalhöyük’s culture was matrilineal, based on his discovery of a number of female figurines, including the terra cotta sculpture of a woman seated between two felines. Mellaart believed that this figure, which he found in a grain bin, represented a fertility or mother goddess.
2. However, Ian Hodder of Cambridge University, who took up excavations of the site in 1993, concluded in 2005 that she is something other than a fertility goddess, stressing the imagery in the back part of the statuette suggesting death (very thin arms, a depiction of a skeletal figure, and prominent bony structures). In Hodder’s view, the female figure is less clearly connected to fertility than it is, perhaps, to the relationship between life and death