Catal Huyuk Women Essay

The general topic is about the role of women in this early agricultural society. Catal Huyuk had a population of 8,000 people and only 2,000 houses. Also, there weren’t any streets so they had to walk along the roofs and enter their homes through their roofs. Their homes were decorated with sculptures and paintings to illustrate animals and human figurines. The author’s basic point is to explore the findings and tell from them the type of society Catal Huyuk was and the roles of both men and women. Of course there could be evidence of both matriarchies and patriarchies but finding out what were the main roles of both sexes. In today’s world we see more of a patriarchy due to men having more complex and dangerous jobs and when women do have the same job their pay isn’t equal to the men pay. Information such as women figurines was found. During the first excavations in the early 1960’s, a figurine was discovered. The sculpture was a heavyset woman sitting on a seat with an animal on each side that could possibly be leopards. It is said that the women could have worshiped a powerful mother goddess and it is likely that the figurine can be just that. It seemed that it was mostly, or started off as, a patriarchy. Ian Hodder states â€Å"cultural anthropology provides no substantiated claims for true matriarchies† (Hodder pg 78). The article has both strengths and weaknesses in my point of view. The strength of this article is the total information about Catal Huyuk and explanations of why there isn’t much evidence. The weakness of this article is that it gives more information about the settlement and not the evidence of roles. I believe that this article has been a bit limp due to the lack of evidence showing the roles of men and women. Though there wasn’t much differentiation of roles that could show that social roles weren’t important. The strongest evidence found was the diet of men and women from this settlement. The only evidence found in teeth was that women had more cavities than men but both had similar diets and lifestyles. Also, women did the cooking and men did the stone making. In addition, many births were taking place and many bodies were found of women who were pregnant that might show that women made more sacrifices. I’ve learned that finding out roles of men and women could be difficult depending on bones. But there could have been little evidence due to the unimportance of roles as previously mentioned. If our world showed no care to social roles, a lot of things would be different. Job preferences would definitely different. In some countries social roles aren’t important and therefore, they have less social and maybe economical problems than we do here. To follow up on the research presented I would search for more recent information and information from earlier research. Because only 18% of the site was excavated, more and more excavations could be done and more new information could be discovered.