Crane Wing Holds Clues to an Ancient Dance

Eighty-five hundred years ago, someone in ancient Anatolia drilled holes in the wing of large bird, then hid the wing in a narrow space between mud-brick houses at Çatalhöyük in what is now Turkey. Why? In a prize-winning article in the journal Antiquity, Nerissa Russell, a Cornell University anthropologist, and Kevin McGowan, a research associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, pieced together cultural and ornithological clues showing that the bird had been a Common Crane and that its wing may have been used in a crane dance.

To pin down the bird?s identity, McGowan matched the bones of the Çatalhöyük crane with Common Crane specimens in the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates.

The bones were pierced with holes in a way that made no sense for dismembering the wing or removing its meat. Because the piercings created holes suitable for a piece of cord or string, Russell thinks that the feathered wings might have been laced on the arms of a dancer to make a costume.

“Dancing is one of the most obvious displays by any social bird, and all species of cranes do it,” McGowan says. The dance involves stiff-legged marching, running, and leaping into the air with spread and beating wings, as well as bowing, pirouetting, and tossing twigs. Russell adds, “Cranes of various species are found all over the world, with the exception of South America and Antarctica, and so are human crane dancers.” The Ainu of Japan, the BaTwa of southern Africa, and the Ostiaks of Siberia are among some of the ancient cultures that had costumed crane dances.

The crane wing, unearthed in an archeological dig in 1995, was stashed in a narrow space between buildings, along with a cow?s horn, two wild goat horns, the skull of a dog, and the stone head of a macelike weapon. Russell notes that some artistic works of that period combine depictions of cranelike birds, cattle, and dogs or foxes in the same motif. “This raises the possibility of an enduring mythic association of cattle, canids, and cranes in Neolithic Anatolia,” Russell and McGowan wrote.

The article, “Dance of the Cranes: Crane Symbolism at Çatalhöyük and Beyond,” was awarded the Antiquity Prize for Best Article of the Year in 2004.

 

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu