Violence and the Sacred in the Ancient Near East

Ian Hodder is Dunleavie Family Professor of Archaeology at Stanford University. A Fellow of the British Academy, he has received numerous awards for his accomplishments, including the Oscar Montelius Medal from the Swedish Society of Antiquaries, the Huxley Memorial Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Fyssen International Prize, and the Gold Medal by the Archaeological Institute of America, along with honorary doctorates from the Bristol and Leiden Universities. Hodder is the author of numerous books, including Symbols in Action (Cambridge, 1982), Reading the Past (Cambridge, 1982), and Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (2012).

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• Part I. Introduction: 1. Setting the archaeological scene Ian Hodder; 2. Introduction to the thought of René Girard William A. Johnsen; Part II. Violence and the Sacred: 3. Death in Çatalhöyük Wolfgang Palaver; 4. A Girardian framework for violent injuries at Neolithic Çatalhöyük in their Western Asian context Christopher J. Knüsel, Bonnie Glencross and Marco Milella; 5. Ritual practices and conflict mitigation at Early Neolithic Körtik Tepe and Göbekli Tepe, Upper Mesopotamia: a mimetic theoretical approach Lee Clare, Oliver Dietrich, Julia Gresky, Jens Notroff, Joris Peters and Nadja Pöllath; 6. Paired leopards and encircled prey: images of rivalry and sacrifice at Çatalhöyük Mark Anspach; Part III. The Dialectics of Mimesis: 7. Mimetic theory, the wall paintings, and the domestication, de-domestication, and sacrifice of cattle at Çatalhöyük William A. Johnsen; 8. The ordeal of the town. Rites and symbols at Çatalhöyük Benoît Chantre; 9. Stretching Girard's hypothesis: road marks for a long-term perspective James Alison; 10. Girard's anthropology vs. cognitive archaeology Jean-Pierre Dupuy; Part IV. Conclusion: 11. Religion as a factor in the development of settled life Ian Hodder.