ABSTRACT
Archaeological science had made enormous leaps since James Mellaart's day; a great deal could be learned from surface studies. Mellaart, and most emphatically Marija Gimbutas, had argued convincingly too many, although not all, archaeologists that the people of atalhyk had helped pass the torch of a long tradition of goddess worship. This chapter explores the three seasons of surface work, Roger Matthews and his crew exposed a cluster of more than thirty Neolithic buildings, covering an area of nearly 2,000 square meters. That one of the season, among other items, they retrieved 11,419 shards of pottery, 1,416 pieces of obsidian, 6,540 fragments of bone, and 118 bits of what was recorded as 'charred remains'. By the third season of surface work, in 1995, the team had collected enough evidence to conclude that what the archaeology textbooks said about atalhyk, especially about its religious life and social organization, needed some modification.
