The Baby in the Brick: A More-Than-Representational Approach to Architectural Action and Intramural Burial at Çatalhöyük

Abstract

This article reconsiders the association, common globally and ubiquitous in Neolithic Turkey, between dead bodies and domestic architecture. Residential burial has conventionally been handled in a representational framework. Buildings’ physical and meaningful aspects are analytically separated, so that they can act as ‘containers of meaning’ in funerary contexts and as concrete technologies in others. Here, a provocative dataset challenges this separation: infant bodies and curated remains buried against the bases of unstable Çatalhöyük walls, as if to reinforce them. Rather than asking what such bodies meant, I adopt a more-than-representational approach inspired by Mol’s (2002) ‘enacting ontology’ and Barad’s (2007) ‘agential realism’ that asks what bodies could do. Doing so extracts bodies and walls from separate domains of mortuary and mechanical action, and asks how they were enacted as objects within Neolithic practice. I trace practices that enacted walls and bodies in Neolithic worlds – making walls’ futures responsive to subsurface burial. This example raises broader implications for the way archaeologists investigate spatial aspects of mortuary practice, and mortuary aspects of architecture, and more broadly the way we determine what the objects of our study are.