Civilization's Cradle

Where is the motherland of civilization? Prehistorians generally locate it in Mesopotamia, but Seton Lloyd, director of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, thinks that the Anatolian Plateau farther north in Turkey may have been civilized first. One of his field parties has excavated a Bronze Age site near Burdur that looked at first like a small village of a dozen small houses. Deeper down, the diggers found mud and stone fortifications 10 to 15 ft. thick, and a wooden upper story that was apparently destroyed by fire about 4,500 B.C. Under the ruins were human skeletons and a great mass of pottery, clay figurines and other artifacts.

The usual theory is that Anatolia was not inhabited by civilized people until about 3,000 B.C., when the cultures of Mesopotamia moved slowly north. But the walled village seems to be as old as anything in Mesopotamia, and heaped-up debris under it hints that the place was occupied by civilized town-dwellers 500 years before the walls were built. So man's first, faltering civilization may have spread from Anatolia to Mesopotamia and later Greece.

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