Science: Backward March

Among archaeologists, a step backward is a step forward—and last week a giant step backward was reported by British Digger James Mellaart, 31, assistant director of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, Turkey. In the ruins of Hacilar, an ancient Anatolian town 200 miles southwest of Ankara. Mellaart has discovered the remains of a culture so sophisticated as to shatter all previous notions about Late Neolithic man. In Hacilar 7,500 years ago, women wore jewelry, artists produced the first known realistic sculptures of the human figure, kids played at marbles and men at asik, a game resembling jacks but using the knucklebones of cattle, which is still a favorite Turkish pastime—more than 200 generations later.

Rouge in the Rubble. Hacilar, now reduced to little more than a farmer's field, has 16 building levels, one on top of another. Digging down to the sixth level of rubble. Mellaart, who has roamed the Anatolian Plateau off and on for a decade, found the remains of brick houses with windows, double doors, walls three feet thick and carefully constructed staircases leading to a second story. The discovery of grinding platforms and storage bins for wheat, barley, peas and lentils convinced Mellaart that the Late Neolithic inhabitants of Hacilar were successful farmers who probably had domesticated cattle.

As artisans, Hacilar's people were remarkably advanced. The tools of work were stone chisels and sickles, made of polished deer antlers and fitted with hard flint blades. The tools of war were sling-stones and maces with heads of blue-veined marble. Hacilar's women had their own sort of weapons: Mellaart found obsidian pendants and bracelets made of fossil shells, as well as lumps of red ocher that were presumably ground into a kind of rouge.

The Great Mother. In the last days of the six weeks of excavation, Mellaart's team of 40 Turkish workmen uncovered what he considers the expedition's most "revolutionary" find: a group of 40 female clay statuettes, all of the Asian Great Mother goddess, but naturalistically carved in a variety of poses. They show the deity as a young girl and mature woman, lying down, squatting asleep with a child on her lap and seated on a leopard throne. Some of the figurines have grotesquely exaggerated pendulous breasts and normally proportioned thighs and buttocks; others reverse the goddess' topography. Sometimes she is naked; at other times she wears a loincloth or even a white painted robe. Says one top authority on the Neolithic period: "From now on the Hacilar figures should appear in the first chapter of any history of world art."

Important as they may be to art lovers, the cache of mother goddesses and the culture that fashioned them is even more significant for prehistorians. For the glories of Hacilar, predating a recent Mesopotamian find by at least 3,000 years, offer strong support for a long-argued theory: that civilization was not cradled in Mesopotamia and carried slowly north as has been generally supposed, but that the Neolithic farmers and artisans of Anatolia fathered a culture later transmitted to the south.