This musical ethnography book is a fascinating companion to Mithen’s volume. It offers countless examples of the capacity of the human brain to mimic natural sounds and to creatively translate them into vocal and instrumental meaningful communication. Naturally, using ethnographic data as a window to our evolutionary past is a controversial argumentative strategy. This is not the goal of this book. But the juxtaposition of the two volumes is enlightening because the natural sound environment of the Central Asian nomads among whom the authors have lived is not likely to have much varied for a very long period of time. Even if such sounds have somewhat changed with climate variations and animal migrations, and cultural evolution itself has run its course, the relationship of the acoustic brain of Homo sapiens to its sonorous surrounding is a constant of human evolution. And so is the use of sounds and music for interacting with the environment and with other humans. The book comes with a CD and a DVD that provide visual and acoustic samples of the natural (mostly animal) and musical examples which are discussed in the text. Semioticians interested in music, iconicity, and ethnology will certainly learn a great deal in this volume.

The Goddess and the Bull. Çatalhöyük: An Archaeological Journey to the Dawn of Civilization.
By Michael Balter. New York: Free Press, 2005.

The Goddess and the Bull

The dawn of civilization means here the beginnings of living in cities and the emergence of complex social and symbolic systems. The author, a celebrated scientific journalist of Science, perceptively explores the way in which the archaeological record is interpreted over time. His study retraces some fifty years of excavation at Çatalhöyük, one of the largest Neolithic settlements in central Turkey’s Konya Plain, which was discovered in 1958 by British archaeologist James Mellaart. This 9,500 old prehistoric village, which was inhabited for a thousand years and whose population is estimated to have been approximately 8,000 at its peak, is made of well preserved mud-brick houses in which artworks depict leopards, vultures, bulls and “Mother Goddesses”. Balter’s skillfully crafted report should be of interest to semioticians not so much for his descriptions of the artifacts as for his vivid rendering of the archaeological process. His main focus is indeed on the archaeologists themselves, who are not mere names appended to scientific articles or books reporting data and interpretations, but embodied minds embedded in institutions and complex webs of influences. Each one is introduced by a life story and his/her involvement with Çatalhöyük is described in both intellectual and emotional terms. But, perhaps more importantly, this book dramatizes the theoretical and methodological changes that occurred during the last fifty years in archaeology. The paradigm shifts from “traditional” to “New”, then from “Processual” to “Post-processual” archaeology are lucidly explained as well as their consequences in the field. Balter exemplifies, without using the word, the semiotic turn in archaeology, the explicit quest for the meanings that prehistoric artifacts had for the people who made them and used them.