Taking the Bull by the Horns: Ideology, Masculinity, and Cattle Horns at Çatalhöyük (Turkey)

Abstract

Animal symbolism is a ubiquitous and powerful component of human ideology. Cattle were clearly the preeminent symbolic taxon in the Southwest Asian Neolithic, and archaeologists have argued that not just cattle, but specifi cally bulls, were key symbols. However, the biological attributes, including the sex, of the cattle used in Neolithic symbolic contexts remain largely unestablished. Furthermore, most of the cattle representations on which these arguments are based are not clearly male. In this article, we test the symbolic importance of taurine masculinity to early villagers by assessing the biological characteristics of cattle horns found in special deposits as well as in more prosaic contexts at the Anatolian Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük.