Çatalhöyük is a tell of a very large Neolithic and Chalcolithic proto-city settlement in southern Anatolia, which existed from approximately 7500 BC to 6400 BC and flourished around 7000 BC. In July 2012, it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The 8th millennium BC spanned the years 8000 BC to 7001 BC. In chronological terms, it is the second full millennium of the current Holocene epoch and is entirely within the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) phase of the Early Neolithic. It is impossible to precisely date events that happened around the time of this millennium and all dates mentioned here are estimates mostly based on geological and anthropological analysis, or by radiometric dating.
In archaeology a tell or tel is an artificial topographical feature, a mound consisting of the accumulated and stratified debris of a succession of consecutive settlements at the same site, the refuse of generations of people who built and inhabited them and natural sediment.
Paleoethnobotany, or archaeobotany, is the study of past human-plant interactions through the recovery and analysis of ancient plant remains. Both terms are synonymous, though paleoethnobotany is generally used in North America and acknowledges the contribution that ethnographic studies have made towards our current understanding of ancient plant exploitation practices, while the term archaeobotany is preferred in Europe and emphasizes the discipline's role within archaeology.
Ian Richard Hodder is a British archaeologist and pioneer of postprocessualist theory in archaeology that first took root among his students and in his own work between 1980 and 1990. At this time he had such students as Henrietta Moore, Ajay Pratap, Nandini Rao, Mike Parker Pearson, Paul Lane, John Muke, Sheena Crawford, Nick Merriman, Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley. As of 2002, he is Dunlevie Family Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University in the United States.
Phytoliths are rigid, microscopic structures made of silica, found in some plant tissues and persisting after the decay of the plant. These plants take up silica from the soil, whereupon it is deposited within different intracellular and extracellular structures of the plant. Phytoliths come in varying shapes and sizes. Although some use "phytolith" to refer to all mineral secretions by plants, it more commonly refers to siliceous plant remains. In contrast, mineralized calcium secretions in cacti are composed of calcium oxalates.
Roderick B. Salisbury is an American anthropological archaeologist specializing in landscape archaeology, human-environmental interactions, and the link between spatial organization and socio-political structure. Since 2015 he has worked at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria.
Aşıklı Höyük is a settlement mound located nearly 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) south of Kızılkaya village on the bank of the Melendiz brook, and 25 km (16 mi) southeast of Aksaray, Turkey. Aşıklı Höyük is located in an area covered by the volcanic tuff of central Cappadocia, in Aksaray Province. The archaeological site of Aşıklı Höyük was first settled in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, around 8,200 BC.
Paul Goldberg is a geologist specializing in geomorphology and geoarchaeology who had done extensive worldwide field researches.
The Paisley Caves or the Paisley Five Mile Point Caves complex is a system of eight caves in an arid, desolate region of south-central Oregon, United States north of the present-day city of Paisley, Oregon. The caves are located in the Summer Lake basin at 4,520 feet (1,380 m) elevation and face west, carved into a ridge of Miocene and Pliocene era basalts mixed with soft volcanic tuffs and breccias by Pleistocene-era waves from Summer Lake. One of the caves may contain archaeological evidence of the oldest definitively-dated human presence in North America. The site was first studied by Luther Cressman in the 1930s.
Pinnacle Point a small promontory immediately south of Mossel Bay, a town on the southern coast of South Africa. Excavations since the year 2000 of a series of caves at Pinnacle Point have revealed occupation by Middle Stone Age people between 170,000 and 40,000 years ago. The focus of excavations has been at Cave 13B (PP13B), where the earliest evidence for the systematic exploitation of marine resources (shellfish) and symbolic behaviour has been documented, and at Pinnacle Point Cave 5–6 (PP5–6), where the oldest evidence for the heat treatment of rock to make stone tools has been documented. The only human remains have been recovered from younger deposits at PP13B which are c. 100,000 years old.
Paleofeces are ancient human feces, often found as part of archaeological excavations or surveys. The term coprolite is often used interchangeably, although coprolite can also refer to fossilized animal feces. Intact feces of ancient people may be found in caves in arid climates and in other locations with suitable preservation conditions. They are studied to determine the diet and health of the people who produced them through the analysis of seeds, small bones, and parasite eggs found inside. The feces can contain information about the person excreting the material as well as information about the material itself. They can also be chemically analyzed for more in-depth information on the individual who excreted them, using lipid analysis and ancient DNA analysis. The success rate of usable DNA extraction is relatively high in paleofeces, making it more reliable than skeletal DNA retrieval.
Julie K. Stein is an American geoarchaeologist, who is best known for her research on the coastal adaptions of prehistoric humans in the Pacific Northwest. She is executive director of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington.
Shahina Farid is a British archaeologist who is best known for her work as Field Director and Project Coordinator at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. She is currently the scientific dating coordinator for Historic England.
Alexandra Bayliss is a British archaeologist and academic. She is Head of Scientific Dating at Historic England, and a part-time Professor of Archaeological Science at the University of Stirling in Scotland. Her research focuses on the construction of exact chronologies of European Neolithic archaeological sites, through the application of Bayesian statistical modelling of radiocarbon dates.
Christine Hastorf is an archaeologist and is currently Professor in the Anthropology department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on agriculture, political complexity, gender, archaeobotany, and the archaeology of the Andes.
Camilla F. Speller is a biomolecular archaeologist, Assistant Professor in Anthropological Archaeology at the University of British Columbia Department of Anthropology.
Alison Weisskopf (1960–2018) was a British-German archaeologist specialising in archaeobotany, specifically the analysis of ancient phytoliths.
Wendy Matthews is a British archaeologist and academic, specialising in Neolithic and Bronze Age Near Eastern archaeology and Geoarchaeology. She is an associate professor at the University of Reading since October 2000.
