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Listen to part of a lecture in an archeology class.
听一段考古学课堂讲座。
OK, we've been talking about early agriculture in the near east.
各位同学，我们一直讨论关于近东地区早期农业的话题。
So let's concentrate on one site and see what we can learn from it.
现在，让我们把精力集中在 一个遗址，看看我们能从中学到什么东西。
Let's look at Catalhoyuk.
咱看一下 Catalhoyuk。
Ah?I'd better write that down.
嗯...这个名字还是给大家写出吧。
Catalhoyuk, that's about as close as we get in English.
Catalhoyuk，英语这样读算是最接近的了。
It's Turkish, really.
这是土耳其语，不骗你们。
The sites in modern day Turkey, and who knows what the original inhabitants called it.
遗址在现代土耳其境内，至于最初土著人怎么叫咱就不用管了。
Anyway, uh Uatalhoyuk was not the first agricultural settlement in the near east, but it was pretty early,
总之，嗯...虽然 Catalhoyuk 不是近东地区最早的农业定居点，但也是相当早的，
settled about 9000 years ago in the Neolithic period.
大约在 9000 年前的新石器时代就有人定居耕作。
And ... umm ... the settlement ... ah ... town really, lasted about a thousand years and grew to a size of about eight or ten thousand people.
还有...嗯...定居...城市延续了一千年，并且发展到八千至一万人口规模（的城市）。
That certainly makes it one of the largest towns in the world at that time.
这在当时肯定是世界上最大的城市。
One of the things that make the settlement of this size impressive is the time period.
让这个聚居点的规模变得如此惊人的原因之一是这个时代——
It's the Neolithic, remember, the late Stone Age.
新石器时代。记住，是较晚的石器时代。
So the people that lived there had only stone tools, no metals.
居住在那里的人只有石器，没有金属工具。
So everything they accomplished, like building this town, they did with just stone, plus wood, bricks,
他们做的每一件事，诸如修建城镇，用的都是石头和木头，
that sort of thing.
砖头之类的建材。
But you got to remember that it was not just any stone they had, they had obsidian.
但大家注意一点，他们所用的石头并不都是普通的石头，还有黑曜石。
And umm ... obsidian is a black, volcanic, well, almost like glass.
哦...黑曜石是一种黑色，火山岩质类似玻璃的石头。
It flakes very nicely into really sharp points.
它能成片剥落而形成精致的尖角。
The sharpest tools of the entire Stone Age were made of obsidian.
整个石器时代最锋利的工具由黑曜石制成。
And urrr ... the people of Catalhoyuk got theirs from further inland, from central Turkey, traded for it,probably.
同时，嗯...Catalhoyuk 人从更远的内陆——土耳其中部，采集，甚至交换得到他们的黑曜石。
Anyway, what I wanna focus on is the way the town was built.
总之，我想把精力集中在城市是如何建成的。
The houses are all rectangular, one storey made of sun dried bricks.
所有的房子都是用晒干的土砖砌成，呈矩形，一层高。
But what's really interesting is that there are no spaces between them, no streets in other words,
但真正有趣的是房子间并无间隔，换句话说：没有街道。
and so generally no doors on the houses either.
因此，房子也一般没有门。
People walked around on the roofs and entered the house through a hatchway on the roof,down a wooden ladder.
人们在屋顶行走，通过屋顶的天窗(架设) 的木梯进入房子。
You can still see the diagonal marks of the ladders in the plaster on the inside walls.
你在内墙上还能看到用灰泥画的楼梯对角线标识。
Once you were in the house, there would be one main room and a couple of small rooms for storage.
进入房间后，里面有一个主室和几个用来存储的小房间。
The main room had the hearths, for cooking and for heat.
主室里有用来做饭和取暖的壁炉。
It would've been pretty cold during the winters.
那时的冬天很冷的。
And it also looks like they made their tools near the fire.
看上去好像他们也在火边制造工具。
There tends to be a lot of obsidian flakes and chips in the hearth ashes, but no chimney.
壁炉灰里有大量的黑曜石碎片，对了，没有烟囱。
The smoke just went out the same hatchway that people used for going in and out themselves.
烟从人们当门使的天窗出去。
So there would have been an open fire inside the house with only one hole in the roof to let the smoke out.
这样看来，屋里生起一对明火，只有一个天窗来通气。
You and I would have found it a bit too smoky in there.
我们看来在屋里会觉得有点呛人。
You can see on the walls, which they plastered and decorated with paintings.
不难看到涂以灰泥和用图案装饰过的四壁，
They ended up with a layer of black soot on them, and so did people's lungs.
它们均被烟熏黑，想必当时人们的肺也会近“烟”者黑。
The bones found in the graves show a layer of soot on the inside of the ribs.
在坟墓中找到的骨头中发现在肋骨内侧有一层“呛黑层”。
And that's another unusual feature of Catalhoyuk, the burial sites.
这是 Catalhoyuk 墓葬遗址又一特征。
The graves have all been found under the houses, right under the floors.
在房子地板的正下方我们发现这些墓葬。
And it maybe this burial custom that explains why the houses were packed in so tightly without streets.
或许这种丧葬风俗解释了为什么房子间间隔紧凑没有街道的原因。
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.
我猜你会认为间隔紧凑出于安全的考虑，但是没有发现能表明存在此种危险的证据。
It maybe they wanted to live as near as possible to their ancestors' graves and be buried near them themselves.
也可能他们想生前死后都与祖先“朝夕相处”。
But it makes a good point.
这样看来，倒是有几分道理。
Based on excavations, we can know the layout of the houses and the location of the graves,
通过挖掘，我们了解房子的布局和墓葬的位置,
but we're only guessing when we tried to say why they did it that way.
但是我们前面说过的安全考虑只是瞎猜而已。
That's the way it is with archeology.
考古就需要这样做。
You are dealing with the physical remains that people left behind.
因为你面对的只是古人留下的实物残骸。
We have no sure access to what they thought and how they felt about things.
没有可靠的途径来了解他们的思想和他们对事物的看法。
I mean it's interesting to speculate.
我想推测也不失为一件乐事。
And the physical artifacts can give us clues, but there is a lot we can not really know.
当然这些古器实物能给我们提供线索，但是很多信息我们仍旧无从得知。
So, for instance, their art.
比如说，他们的艺术。
They painted on the plastered walls and usually they painted hunting scenes with wild animals in them.
他们在灰泥墙上作画，也常画有野兽（和有人）的狩猎图。
Now they did hunt and they also raised cereal crops and kept sheep, but we do not know why so many of the paintings are of hunting scenes.
他们确实打猎，同时也在种植粮食作物、饲养绵羊，但我们不知道为什么有这么多画都只与狩猎相关。
Was it supposed to have religious or magical significance?
难道有宗教或魔法方面的意义?
That's the kind of thing we can only guess at based on clues.
而这些我们只能基于拥有线索的估测。
And hopefully, further excavation of Catalhoyuk will yield more clues.
所幸的是，对 Catalhoyuk 进一步的挖掘工作将出土更多的实物和线索。
But we'll probably never know for sure.
但这一点谁也不能保证。
