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Previous articleNext article FreeFrom the EditorStephanie L. BudinStephanie L. Budin Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreGreetings, Readers!I trust that you are all at home, at least as I type these words in late April. I hope that you are well, although I take nothing for granted. I at least like to think that the arrival of this issue brings some joy and an intellectual spark to your daily routine, whatever that has become. My comment about “rain of frogs” last issue now seems rather naïve, really…In much, much happier news, welcome to the first of two Special Topics issues on twenty-five years of excavations at Çatalhöyük, guest edited by Dr. Ian Hodder of Stanford University, whose introductory essay is the first article herein. Looking at this collection of articles, it is extraordinary to consider how far archaeology has come since its earliest days. This year is the 100th anniversary of Alan Wace’s excavations at Mycenae, who began digging there on St. George’s Day 1920 (that’s 23 April for those of us outside the UK—Wace was a Cambridge man himself). His technique was generally considered to be much superior to that of his predecessor in the field Heinrich Schliemann, who went at Troy with considerable enthusiasm and a bulldozer before turning to the realm of Agamemnon. Even so, so much archaeology of the day was focused on finery. Gold, lapis lazuli, fine ivory carvings—all the markers of “high” civilization. Fine, painted ceramics were collected with reverence; common wares and cooking pots were neglected, as were, often, bones. It is even said that Sir Arthur Evans, excavating Knossos, tossed out a bunch of scrap pottery sherds that, in better informed retrospect, turned out to be the first findings of Linear A. I doubt anyone at the time was looking for latrines (except for personal use).Basically, we were looking for treasures. Pretty things to put into museums to remind ourselves of the past glories to which we are the heirs.Jump ahead one hundred years. We have full chronologies based on pottery, cylinder seals, stratigraphy, dendrochronology, and radiocarbon dating (all still in flux). We look for new sites to dig using satellites and ground penetrating radar. Field surveys are accompanied by drones (I’m sure many student archaeologists doing field surveys already felt like drones); much digging is accomplished by spade rather than shovel, and all of it gets the sieving treatment and flotation so that not a single seed might be lost. We moved down the social scale from palaces and temples to homes and stables, from fineries to ovens and spindle whorls. We considered the actual, daily-life people who populated the empires and kingdoms of interest, literally studying their bones. We developed and applied theories to understand what we were looking at, especially as we came to problematize basic conceptions of worldview. It occurred to us that one half of those ancient populations was female (still working on that one).Nowhere are these developments more critical than for the study of the Paleo–Neolithic periods (when we often don’t even get the pottery), and the past twenty-five years at Çatalhöyük show what can happen when archaeologists apply Best Available Technology to their work. In this issue, in addition to the basics such as stratigraphy and artifact, we are presented with matters isotopic, sedimentological, and geochemical; Electrical Resistivity Tomography; taskscapes, seasonality, and the analysis of “negative” space; as well as good old fashioned taphonomy and hard-core physical anthropology. This issue reveals the tools and techniques now available to wrest the most data from millennia-old finds, as well as what can be learned about ancient people and how they lived. The latrines will appear in the next issue. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Near Eastern Archaeology Volume 83, Number 2June 2020 A journal of the American Schools of Oriental Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709854 Views: 160 Copyright 2020 American Schools of Oriental Research Crossref reports no articles citing this article.