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" Painting Daily Life: Spatial Contexts, Temporalities and Experiences of Architectural Paintings at Çatalhöyük "
Busacca, Gesualdo
Hodder, Ian
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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1053926
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| Doc. No
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TL53043
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| Main Entry
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Busacca, Gesualdo
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| Title & Author
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Painting Daily Life: Spatial Contexts, Temporalities and Experiences of Architectural Paintings at Çatalhöyük\ Busacca, Gesualdo Hodder, Ian
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| College
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Stanford University
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| Date
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2020
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| Note
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299 p.
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| Abstract
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Given their aesthetic, symbolic, and epistemological underpinnings, prehistoric inscribed or image-bearing artifacts such as architectural paintings have long been treated as a 'transcendent' category of archaeological finds, to be investigated in isolation from their broader contexts and even from their own materiality. This dissertation revisits one of the richest corpuses of architectural paintings in prehistoric Southwest Asia, uncovered at the Anatolian site of Çatalhöyük (c. 7100-5900 BC), with a specific focus on their spatial contexts, materialities, temporalities and daily experience. Through a diversified set of archaeological methods including spatial analysis, cross-sectional analysis, photogrammetry and virtual reconstruction, this research shows how deeply integrated paintings were within the practices and rhythms that constituted daily life at the Neolithic site. In terms of spatial patterning and contextual associations, this research reveals a widespread distribution of paintings throughout the site, but also higher densities of paintings in some buildings and some periods within the long occupation of the site. The contextual associations of paintings also change through time at the site, with a marked ritual association to funerary practices during the middle occupation and a new association with fire installations such as ovens and hearths since the late period. Significant changes through time also emerged from the analysis of plastering and painting practices, with peaks of multi-layered paintings in the early and middle periods and a generalized decrease in painting activity since the late period. In-depth examination of painted plasters also shows peculiar practices of painting preparation, application, repetition, and repair, practices that reveal the dynamic nature of painted surfaces and their frequent transformations. An experimental study of lighting conditions within Çatalhöyük houses suggests very low levels of illuminance, especially in the preferential locations of paintings, further downplaying an assumption of architectural paintings as durable surfaces mainly intended for visual display. These interconnected research threads compose an understanding of architectural paintings that significantly differs from the ocularcentric narrative of the disembodies image, one where the emphasis is on the act of painting itself and its associated practices, rather than on the paintings' visual content.
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Ancient history
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Archaeology
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Architecture
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Art history
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Hodder, Ian
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Stanford University
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