A new book on archaeology makes the claim that "our understanding of our own origins was changed forever" by a very significant dig in Turkey. Michael Balter, author of "The Goddess and the Bull: An Archaeological Journey to the Dawn of Civilization," is a correspondent for the journal "Science." His book is a semi-official "biography" of an archaeological dig in Turkey. But is more than just that. It is three books in one – a history of the dig and the personalities of the archaeologists and other scientists who have conducted it, a history of archaeological theory over the last forty or so years, and finally, not least, a discussion of what the dig tells us about our past.
As for our past, there were extravagant claims made for some of the finds first reported from the site such as evidence for "goddess" worship, a society dominated by women (at least in the cult), the early domestication of certain food species, etc., upon which later investigations have cast doubts.
Nevertheless Balter thinks this dig changed our ideas about our origins.
Pretty good review of the theoretical and cultural (of archaeologists) milieu that has surrounded the work at Catalhoyuk over the years. I've got a couple of quibbles here and there but nothing substantial and all having to do with more ore less esoteric theoretical concepts. But it gives a pretty good, if brief, overview of the whole Processual/Post-processual argument. Matter of fact, it really gets to the core of the dillema archaeology has faced for years: A lack of an adequate scientific theory. To be science, a theory must contain some empirical referents for its theoretical concepts. That's been archaeology's main sticking point. We want -- largely because we're trained as cultural anthropologists -- to study things like "behavior", "beliefs", "social structures" and such, but we have rarely made the relation between those concepts and the actual objects we study -- rocks and stones and sticks and bones -- either explicit or empirically defensible.
So we've either tried to apply physics-like theory to artifacts and simply assume they represent what we want them to represent (Processual) or we make the meanings we assign to artifacts the objects of study and not worry about whether or not there is any logical relation to the supposed empirical referents (Post-processual).
One could argue that the Post-processualists are, in a sense, closer to true science than the processualists since they explicitly link theory to the units of study. Trouble is, that makes it rather devoid of any sort of empirical import. In a way, they don't even need artifacts to study. The Processualists had the opposite problem: lots of artifacts and measurements, but little to link it with the theory they were trying to develop.