In Hodder, I. (ed.), Consciousness and Creativity at the Dawn of Settled Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Accepted for publication. Do not use or circulate without permission. 1 Containers and Creativity in Late Neolithic Upper Mesopotamia Olivier Nieuwenhuyse (Freie Universität Berlin) Introduction Stimulated by my reading of Merlin Donald (1991, 1998), I shall explore the notions of ‘consciousness’ and ‘creativity’ through the concept of the extended mind. The crux of my argument is that the expanding material world in the Neolithic can be seen as an expansion of the extended, or distributed mind (Hodder, this volume). I shall leave aside what actually constitutes human cognition or how it is modularly organized (see the contributions of Thornton, Wheeler this volume). Rather, being an archaeologist, I shall concentrate on the ‘extended’ part of the hybrid, working from the broad notion that the human cognitive world and the (material) environment in which humans socialize are dialectically related (Boivin 2008, Clark 1997, Dunbar et al. 2010, Malafouris 2016, Renfrew 1998, 2004, 2012). For Donald (1991), later Palaeolithic humans reached the cognitive level of what he called ‘theoretic’ thought when for the first time they developed symbolic external storage in the form of visuographic expression; to many scholars this crucial innovation turned ‘us’ into real humans. Donald went on to describe subsequent stages of cognitive development with the further elaboration of external storage during the ‘ideographic’, ‘phonologic’ and ‘global electronics’ stages, associated with the introduction of cuneiform, alphabetic writing, and the internet, respectively (Donald 1991: 285ff). But this account left an immense temporal gap between the Late Palaeolithic and the first literate societies unexplored. Subsequent studies have filled to gap by identifying the Neolithic as the key intermediary stage (Cauvin 1994, Hodder 1990, Mithen 2002, Renfrew 1998, 2001, 2012, Watkins 2004, 2010, 2017). Sedentism and domestication were associated with unprecedented investments in a denser material world and an expanding exchange of goods, people and ideas. These in turn spurred, and were simultaneously facilitated by, cognitive change. These inspiring studies lead me to make several points. First, I wish to caution against the widespread notion of a unified Neolithic as prevalent in several accounts of human cognitive change. ‘The Neolithic’ never existed; this helpful abstraction remains a figment of contemporary scholarly imagination (Finlayson 2013). This is not just to emphasize the dramatic regional diversity in the ways the Neolithic unfolded in the ancient Near East (Akkermans and Schwartz 2003), but more pointedly to underscore the quantitative and qualitative gulf that separates the initial stages of the Neolithic from its later stages (Bernbeck and Nieuwenhuyse 2013). I will make my point by discussing the use of Çatalhöyük as a case study for the Neolithic. Further, to put this extraordinary site into a comparative perspective I will discuss aspects of reflexive potential and creativity in the later Neolithic of Upper Mesopotamia, mainly focussing on the case study of Tell Sabi Abyad in northern Syria. In contemporary Western culture, notions of creativity often concern its commodification value, typically shrouded in myth. ‘Creativity’ either refers to idealized forms of individual self- expression in producing items for elite consumption (Bourdieu 1984, Veblen 1899) or to technological innovation to streamline industrial production (Bernbeck 2017). As Sofaer (2015: 2) observed, this modern, capitalist take on creativity leaves little room for its useful extrapolation into the pre-modern past. For archaeologists, creativity can be seen more neutrally as a social cognitive phenomenon, something that emerges in specific social settings that