The rise of Çatalhöyük is one of my favorite topics to cover in the Introduction to Anthropology course. Located in central Turkey, the proto-urban settlement was occupied for more than a millennium, starting about 9000 years ago. At any given time during Çatalhöyük’s existence, between 3,000 and 8,000 people lived in what is one of the oldest known “towns” in …
In October of 2014, Romanian mass-media featured the local story of a few dozen citizens—most of them Orthodox nuns—refusing their newly issued state health insurance cards, on the grounds that the term card imprinted on the card would spell, when read backwards, drac—the Romanian word for “devil.” It seemed that the nuns, along with a few Orthodox priests and …
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology