Personal memory, the scaffolded mind, and cognitive change in the Neolithic

‘The Çatalhöyük evidence as a whole’, write Hodder and Pels, ‘gives many indications that, indeed, people began to link themselves to specific pasts, by burying pots, tools, humans and hunting trophies in ways that indicate particular memories rather than a generic reference to a group’ (2010, 182). Hodder draws on his multidisciplinary team’s impressive studies of a wide range of artifacts and practices - household symbols, pit-digging, burial, figurines, tools, decoration, and more - to argue that forms of remembering emerged or consolidated at Çatalhöyük that were neither merely routinized and habitual, nor merely traditional and generic, and that took as their objects neither repeated activities nor widespread factual knowledge. Rather, the new forms of social memory being constructed at Çatalhöyük were ‘conscious, specific, and commemorative’, as household groups ‘began to make specific connections between the present and the past’ (Hodder & Cessford 2004, 35; Hodder 2006, 143).