【正文】 he king of the plas, like Jupiter was the king of all the gods. Professor Oh, Mathew, that’s a great example. Student Yeah! And each student chose a pla and then did research on it to write a report and make a presentation. They went to the library to do the research, then they made presentations about the pla they chose. Professor So, in one science unit, in which the focus was astronomy, the students also learned about the literature of Greek and Roman mythology, used research skills in the library, wrote a report and practiced their oral presentation skills. Student Exactly! He used this one topic to teach thirdgrades all that stuff — how to use the books in the library, to write reports, and even how to speak in public. Plus they had a great time doing it. Professor You know, Mathew, this is just what we’ve been talking about in our class. I’m sure everyone can learn something from your experience. You know, Mathew, I’d love for you to talk about this astronomy unit in class on Wednesday. Student Really?! Hmmm… ‘cause I don’t really think I’ll have any time to write my paper by then. Professor Oh, you won’t need to write anything new just yet. For Wednesday, use your class observation notes and explain the things we’ve discussed today. Student Ok, that sounds all right. Lecture Narrator Listen to part of a lecture in an archeology class. 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 sites 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. It’s the Neolithic, remember, the late Stone Age. So the people that lived there had only stone tools, no metals. So everything they acplished, 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 urrr... 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. 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. 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,