Part I
Professor: OK, we’ve been talking about early agriculture in the near east. So let’s concentrate on one site and see what we can learn from it. Let’s look at Catalhoyuk. Ah… I’d better write that down. Catalhoyuk, that’s about as close as we get in English. It’s Turkish, really. The site's in modern day Turkey, and who knows what the original inhabitants called it.
Anyway, uh…Catalhoyuk wasn’t the first agricultural settlement in the Near East, but it was pretty early, settled about 9000 years ago in the Neolithic period. And ...umm... the settlement...ah...town really, lasted about a thousand years and grew to a size of about eight or ten thousand people. That certainly makes it one of the largest towns in the world at that time. One of the things that make the settlement of this size impressive is the time period.
"Catalhoyuk"，这是我们用英语能读出来的最接近的发音，它其实是土耳其语，遗址现场位置在当今的土耳其，没人知道那些原始居民原本是怎么叫它的。
这种规模的定居点之所以令人印象深刻的原因之一是它所处的时间段。
1. site |saɪt|
noun. a place where sth has happened or that is used for sth 现场；发生地；场所
E.g.: an archaeological site
一个考古现场
2. settlement|ˈsetlmənt|
noun. a place where people have come to live and make their homes, especially where few or no people lived before （尤指拓荒安家的）定居点
E.g.: The village is a settlement of just fifty houses.
这个村子是个只有五十户人的居住地。
3. the Near East
The Near East is the same as the Middle East . 近东；中东
Part II
It’s the Neolithic, remember, the late Stone Age. So the people that lived there had only stone tools, no metals. So everything they accomplished, like building this town, they did with just stone, plus wood, bricks, that sort of thing. But you got to remember that it wasn’t just any stone they had, they had obsidian.
And umm... obsidian is a black, volcanic, well, almost like glass. It flakes very nicely into really sharp points. The sharpest tools of the entire Stone Age were made of obsidian. And the people of Catalhoyuk got theirs from further inland, from central Turkey, traded for it, probably.Anyway, what I wanna focus on is the way the town was built.
它可以很好地剥落成非常锋利的尖头。整个石器时代最锋利的工具都是用黑曜石制成的。Catalhoyuk 人的黑曜石可能是从更远的内陆，从土耳其中部获得的，可能是通过交易得来的。
1. flake |fleɪk|
verb. to fall off in small thin pieces （成小薄片）脱落，剥落
E.g.: You could see bare wood where the paint had flaked off.
油漆剥落处可以看见光秃秃的木头。
Part III
The houses are all rectangular, one storey, made of sun dried bricks. But what’s really interesting is that there are no spaces between them, no streets in other words, and so generally no doors on the houses either. People walked around on the roofs and entered the house through a hatchway on the roof, down a wooden ladder. You can still see the diagonal marks of the ladders in the plaster on the inside walls.
Once you were in the house, there would be one main room and a couple of small rooms for storage. The main room had the hearths, for cooking and for heat. It would’ve been pretty cold during the winters. And it also looks like they made their tools near the fire. There tends to be a lot of obsidian flakes and chips in the hearth ashes, but no chimney. The smoke just went out the same hatchway that people used for going in and out themselves. So there would have been an open fire inside the house with only one hole in the roof to let the smoke out. You and I would have found it a bit too smoky in there.
You can see on the walls, which they plastered and decorated with paintings. They ended up with a layer of black soot on them, and so did people’s lungs. The bones found in the graves show a layer of soot on the inside of the ribs.
烟就是从人们自己进进出出的那个开口排出，所以屋子里应该是有明火，屋顶上只有一个洞可以让烟排出。
1. triangle三角形, square 正方形, rectangle 长方形, rhomboid 菱形, circle 圆形, ellipse 椭圆形, pentagon 五角形, sphere 球体, cube 立方体, cylinder 圆柱体, cone 圆锥体, pyramid 棱锥体
2. hatchway|ˈhætʃweɪ|
noun. an opening or a door in a floor or ceiling （地面或天花板的）开口，门，盖子
E.g.: a hatchway to the attic
通向阁楼的入口
3. diagonal|daɪˈægənl|
adj. at an angle; joining two opposite sides of sth at an angle 斜线的；对角线的
E.g.: The blanket is covered with diagonal stripes.
毯子上都是斜纹。
4. hearth |hɑ:θ|
noun. the floor at the bottom of a fireplace (=the space for a fire in the wall of a room); the area in front of this 壁炉炉床；壁炉前的地面
E.g.: The cat dozed in its favourite spot on the hearth.
猫躺在壁炉前它最喜欢的地方打盹。
5. soot|sʊt|
noun. black powder that is produced when wood, coal, etc. is burnt 煤烟子；油烟
Part IV
And that’s another unusual feature of Catalhoyuk, the burial sites. The graves have all been found under the houses, right under the floors. And it maybe this burial custom that explains why the houses were packed in so tightly without streets. I mean, you might think it was for protection or something, but there has been no evidence found yet of any violent attack that would indicate that kind of danger. It maybe they wanted to live as near as possible to their ancestors’ graves and be buried near them themselves. But it makes a good point.
Based on excavations, we can know the layout of the houses and the location of the graves, but we’re only guessing when we tried to say why they did it that way. That’s the way it is with archeology. You are dealing with the physical remains that people left behind. We have no sure access to what they thought and how they felt about things. I mean it’s interesting to speculate.
也许这种下葬习俗解释了为什么房屋被挤着排列地如此紧密，连街道都没有。我的意思是，你可能认为这是为了安全防护之类的，但目前还没有发现任何暴力袭击的迹象表明有这种潜在危险。
根据发掘，我们可以知道房屋的布局和坟墓的位置，但当我们试图解释他们为什么这样安排时，我们只是在猜测而已。这就是考古学的方式，你正在打交道的只是人们遗留下来的物质残骸而已。
1. pack in/into
to put a lot of things or people into a limited space 在（有限空间里）塞进（大量的人或物）；塞满
E.g.: They've managed to pack a lot of information into a very small book..
他们设法把大量的信息编进了一本很小的书中。
2. with |wɪð|
prep. concerning; in the case of 关于；对于；对…来说
E.g.: With these students it's pronunciation that's the problem.
对这些学生来说，成问题的是发音。
3. access |ˈækses|
noun. the opportunity or right to use sth or to see sb/sth （使用或见到的）机会，权利
E.g.: access to confidential information.
接触机密情报的机会
4. speculate |ˈspekjuleɪt|
verb. to form an opinion about sth without knowing all the details or facts 推测；猜测；推断
E.g.: We can speculate that the stone circles were used in some sort of pagan ceremony.
我们可以推测，这些石头排成的圆圈是用于某种异教崇拜仪式的。
Part V
And the physical artifacts can give us clues, but there is a lot we can’t really know.
So, for instance, their art. They painted on the plastered walls and usually they painted hunting scenes with wild animals in them. Now they did hunt and they also raised cereal crops and kept sheep, but we don’t know why so many of the paintings are of hunting scenes. Was it supposed to have religious or magical significance? That’s the kind of thing we can only guess at based on clues. And hopefully, further excavation of Catalhoyuk will yield more clues. But we’ll probably never know for sure.
他们在抹灰泥的墙上作画，通常他们画的是有很多野生动物的狩猎场景。
1. cereal
noun.one of various types of grass that produce grains that can be eaten or are used to make flour or bread. Wheat , barley and rye are all cereals. 谷类植物
E.g.: cereal crops
谷类作物
2. of |əv|
prep. used to say what sb/sth is, consists of, or contains （用于表示性质、组成或涵盖）即，由…组成
E.g.: the issue of housing
住房问题
3. yield |ji:ld|
verb. to produce or provide sth, for example a profit, result or crop 出产（作物）；产生（收益、效益等）；提供
E.g.: The research has yielded useful information.
这项研究提供了有用的资料。
