Catalhoyuk Archaeobotanical Report

www.escholarship.org/uc/item/2220x08r Dec 1996- <;atal Hoyiik Archaeobotanical Report. Julie Near and Christine Hastorf Ul6 Pe-& LcJ-. u 3-:J The 1996 field season at <;atal Hoyiik marked the second season of flotation at the project. During this season the Palaeoethn.J)botany team, directed by Christine Hastorf and assisted by Julie Near of the University of California at Berkeley, processed soil samples from both the North and Mellaart areas of the excavation. Two flotation machines were used concurrently in or,a~r to flot the 15,577 liters of sampled soil from these two areas. Maria Mangafa from the University of Thessaloniki, Greece also processed soil samples during in the second month of the season. The first machine was built in 1995 by Ann Butler of the Institute of Archaeology, London and was based on the Ankara system design using a 5 5 gallon oil drum as the flotation tank, while the second was built in 1996 and was based on the SMAP design with a 7 5 cm diameter flotation tank (compared to a 56 cm diameter oil drum). Both of the machines used a . Smm aperture mesh to recover the heavy residue and a . 1 7 mm aperture cloth for the light fraction. The systems used recycled water from their individual two tank settling system. Due to the particularly silty nature of the samples, the tanks required complete cleaning (of both the settling tanks and flotation tank) one to two times a week in addition to partial cleaning at the end of each day. Samples were selected for each machine based on the size of foe sample, with smaller samples going to the Ankara machine (called the small machine) and larger samples going to the SMAP machine (big machine). A total of 412 samples were processed with the small machine and the average volume was 15. 6 liters. The large machine processed 275 samples with an average volume of 33.3 liters. Although it was our feeling that the machines were comparable in effectiveness, we conduced an experiment in order to test the recovery rates of the two machines. The results have not yet been compiled but will be written up in a paper at the beginning of the 1997 season. The sampling strategy for the 1996 season was as follows: All units were to be sampled using bulk soil collection. In units containing midden or other secondary, mixed soil matrices, a scatter sample was requested in addition to the bulk sample. In certain excavation units from the North area (primarily floor contexts) several samples from the same unit were taken for flotation. These were taken at one meter intervals across the unit. The suggested target volume of soil per sample was 40 liters at the beginning of the season based on preliminary density data from 35 flot samples in the North area. In the middle of the season this target volume was changed to 20 liters in order to accommodate the time constraints of the excavation, but after several weeks it was again put back to 40 liters. Many of the units were not large enough to provide the target volume, thus the range of sample sizes was from . 5 liters to 67 liters. Of the 688 samples processed in 1996 205 have been considered priority samples based on the contexts from which they were excavated. 40 of the £lots from these samples have thus far been analyzed for their content. Species identifications remain to be made in many cases as comparative collections must be first consulted. The data compiled to date includes density analyses and presence/absence analyses of the following categories of remains: wood, cereals, chaff: pulses, parenchyma, nut, hackberry, weed seeds, indeterminate botanical material and charred mouse droppings. Heavy residue was collected from the flotation samples and sorted by a team of workers throughout the 1996 season. Residues from 199 5 samples as well as 1996