ABSTRACT
This dominant view ignores and makes invisible something very visible if only our practical, economically oriented and disinterested logic could see it: a massive explosion of evidence concerned with the symbolic and apparently irrational. The appearance of all this symbolism in association with the origins of agriculture has tended to be ignored (but see Cauvin and Cauvin 1982) because it appears irrational. For example, human skulls with the faces modelled in clay are found in houses in the Near East, bulls’ heads are placed in or on houses in the Near East and in southeast Europe, the beaks of vultures are set into protuberances on house walls at Catal Huyuk in Turkey where also are found models of women sitting on leopards, and complex ovens and hearths surrounded by elaborately decorated pottery are found in houses in southeast Europe, as are boulders with human heads carved to look like fish. What could all this and much more ‘irrational’ symbolism mean? And why should it appear with such a flourish contemporary with the adoption of agriculture in the Near East and southeast Europe, the two areas to be considered in this paper?
