Mortars and food-work evidence

The unglamorous groundwork

Çakmaktepe is best known for its burnt animal-head deposits, but the excavation stresses that it was also an ordinary settlement where daily food work mattered. Cut into the bedrock across the site are conical holes of varying size and depth, which official reporting interprets as mortars — fixed installations for pounding and processing. Alongside them the team records grinding and processing tools, part of the systematic working of wild plants long before farmed cereals appear.

This is the food technology that made larger gatherings, and eventually agriculture, possible. At Çakmaktepe it is not a footnote to the monuments; it is much of what the site has to show, and the excavators read the mortars beside the domestic buildings and the special structures as parts of one settled way of life.

What still needs publication

The evidence is real but lightly documented in public. Individual mortar counts, dimensions, use-wear and any residue analysis have not been published in controlled form, and the identification of the bedrock pits as mortars — as opposed to other functions such as post settings or storage — rests on interpretation that fuller study will test. As with the rest of the site, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A framing is typological, and radiocarbon dating is pending.