through paradoxically persistent change

There is, however, a paradox here. I argue that the evolutionary adaptation at work here is the encouragement of persistence in pursuit of “psychobiological homeostasis,” yet, as Hodder plainly states:

It is clear that the materialization of the social structures at Catalhdyiik did not lead to fixity and lack of change. Indeed the rate of cultural change seems to increase through the sequence and the rate of house rebuilding also increases ... One can argue, in fact, that material entanglement produced a representation in the object world of the social structure such that it could be contested and changed. There is much emphasis on constructing continuities through time, and links to the ancestors ... But at the same time, there were moves to transform traditional modes of life ... There is a continual tension between continuity and change, with the latter beginning to get the upper hand in the upper [that is, later, more recent] levels of the site.

(2006, 204-205)

How might this continual tension be resolved or explained? Why did the prolonged and stable human situation of the Paleolithic change to the Neolithic around 12,000 years ago? The Neolithic coincides with the massive increase in artifactual production and, as Hodder says, an increasing rate of change. Improvement is itself change, and if one improves a situation, even in order to make it more permanent, one changes it. Once the mutually enhancing elements of artifactual production, material entanglement, and the application of human social intelligence to the environment were active, barriers against rapid change collapsed. In that situation, change becomes our default state, so that inducements for change are no longer necessary but inducements for stability become advantageous. Earlier, Lewis-Williams suggested that “rock art probably exercised a conservative, stabilizing effect” (2002, 158). The behavior that was ancestral to both art and religion may have exerted a stabilizing effect, but here we begin to see the manifestation of the later distinction between art and religion. What we now call art reveals possibilities for improvement and therefore change. Religion, as we now see it, involves set patterns of art, which encourage homeostasis, moderating the impetus for change and preventing it from being overly rapid and damaging. Unsuccessful, short-lived, patterns of behavior would manifest as temporary “sub-cultures" or “counter-cultures,” driven largely by artistic expressions and materializations. These provide a challenge to the stability of dominant culture that must either die out, separate from, or transform the original culture.

to the earliest cities

Allowing that art and religion, so understood, do indeed comingle in parietal art, at Gobekli Tepe, and in Qatalhóyük, what does it tell us about ourselves, about our history, and about how art and religion relate to one another in the past, in the present, and perhaps in the future? The growing consensus among archeologists and paleoanthropologists, not only those from the Templeton Catalhbyiik project, is that religious behavior contributed significantly, if not decisively, to the development of more complex culture as homo sapiens became more “civilized” (by which I mean no value judgment, simply populations that are more commonly found in the large agglomerations we call cities—Latin civitates).

I do not imply that a specific transition from Gobekli Tepe to Qatalhóyük is “the” singular event that marks and precipitates the “Neolithic Revolution"—nor even that it is the earliest such transition, nor even that "it” is an event at all—simply that the two cultures are excellent example of modes of religiosity and art that demonstrate the workings and the utility of the art/ religion complex that I am attempting to elucidate.¹" The monumental art/ religion behavior of Gobekli Tepe was enormously successful both in the sense that it persisted for about 1,700 years and in the sense that it contributed significantly if indirectly to the very possibility of the domestic art/religion lifestyle of Qatalhoyiik. The general trend from something like Gobekli Tepe to something like Catalhbyiik serves as an exemplar. Gobekli Tepe itself, or the kind of culture that it represents, was superseded by cultures such as that of Qatalhbyiik, which certainly superseded other cultures around it. As Wason says, “the period of occupation of Catalhbyiik is associated with a disappearance of sites from the alluvial fan on which the site is located. People were drawn into (and perhaps also repulsed from) this special place” (Wason 2010, 289). He specifically compares Gobekli Tepe to Catalhbyiik, which “differed, of course, in being at heart a settlement rather than a ceremonial center" (288), but neither he nor any of the contributors consider what they had in common specifically as centers of art—especially as understood ethologi-cally. It is notable that neither the 2010 nor the 2014 volumes include contributions from any ethologist of art, practicing artist, or art historian.¹¹ Where other strategies of explanation fall short, the ethology of art could contribute significantly.

In either typical or atypical circumstances, in persistent peace or in rapidly changing turmoil, the determination of human cultural creativity is complex, even chaotic. It is subtle, emergent, and impossible to predict. To put it bluntly (but metaphorically), we need all the help that we can get to understand such a process. While the monumental behavior of Gbbekli Tepe may have given rise to agriculture and permanent settlements and ceded its place to smaller-scale domestic art in Catalhoyiik, it certainly did not go away. It continued through the Ubaid period of c. 6,500 to 3,800 BCE, whose culture combined unwalled settlements of rectangular mud-brick domiciles like those of Catalhoyiik with temples that housed monumental, extra-domestic complexes of art and religion, and it was to re-emerge, or to re-establish its effectiveness, in the early cities that superseded places like Catalhoyiik as the largest agglomerations of human habitation. From the early 5th millennium the first known cities emerged. Among these, the Sumerian city of Uruk, near the Euphrates in what is now southern Iraq, combined the domestic and the monumental to great effect as a city of as many as 50—80,000 inhabitants that persisted over more than 5,000 years. At its height, around 3,000 BCE, Uruk was 7.5 times the size ofQatalhoyiik with more than ten times the population. The Eanna precinct of Uruk was an area of monumental and ritual art that we know, from later texts to have been a religious center, home of the Goddess Inanna. Through the paradox of persistent change, we have moved from Paleolithic nomadic hunter/gatherers to the type of cultural context in which prophecy in the Biblical sense was to emerge.