Çatalhöyük

Çatalhöyük (also spelled Çatal Hüyük, from Turkish çatal, "fork," and höyük, "mound") is a large Neolithic and Chalcolithic double tell (artificial settlement mound) situated on the alluvial fan of the Çarşamba River across the southern Konya Plain of central Anatolia, Turkey, approximately 40 km southeast of modern Konya. Discovered in November 1958 by James Mellaart, David French, and Alan Hall, excavated by Mellaart from 1961 to 1965, and investigated through a landmark 25-year post-processual and bioarchaeological research program directed by Ian Hodder (Stanford University, 1993–2018), the East Mound of Çatalhöyük spans approximately 7100 to 5950 calibrated years BCE (with the adjacent Chalcolithic West Mound occupied from ~6000 to 5600 cal BCE). Covering 13.5 hectares and rising 21 meters above the plain across 18 successive superimposed building horizons, Çatalhöyük represents one of the largest and most densely populated proto-urban communities of the Neolithic Revolution—yet it lacked streets, public plazas, palaces, temples, or centralized administrative hierarchy, organizing social, economic, and ritual life entirely within self-sufficient domestic Direct-Entry Houses ("History Houses").

Unlike later Bronze Age Near Eastern cities organized around streets, city walls, and monumental palace-temple precincts, Neolithic Çatalhöyük was constructed as an agglutinated cellular honeycomb: rectangular mudbrick houses (averaging ~25–30 m²) were built flush against their neighbors, separated only by narrow party walls or small midden courtyards where household refuse and sheep dung accumulated. Because there were no ground-level doors or windows in the exterior walls, all circulation, daily craft activity, and social interaction took place across the interconnected flat roofs of the settlement. Residents descended into their homes via a diagonal wooden ladder positioned beneath a square roof opening in the southern corner of the main room, which simultaneously served as the chimney vent for the hearth and domed mud oven below.

Inside, every house obeyed a strict, standardized spatial grammar reproduced across generations:

• Southern "Dirty" Domestic Zone: Situated beneath the roof ladder and smoke hole, containing the rectangular hearth, domed bread oven, obsidian tool-knapping cache buried beneath the floor, and narrow side storage bins holding dried lentils, peas, almonds, and cereal grain. Floors here are stained dark with wood ash, phytoliths, and microscopic cooking debris.
• Northern and Eastern "Clean" Ritual & Burial Platforms: Raised rectangular platforms plastered with pristine white calcareous marl, kept meticulously swept and replastered up to 100–450 times over the 50-to-100-year lifespan of a single house (providing sub-annual micro-stratigraphic resolution akin to varves or tree rings). Beneath these white platforms, household members buried their dead, and on the adjacent northern and eastern walls they mounted plastered wild bull skulls (bucrania) and painted geometric and narrative murals.

When a house reached the end of its structural life after ~60–80 years, its inhabitants dismantled the roof timbers, retrieved sacred wall reliefs, meticulously scoured the floor, demolished the upper mudbrick walls inward to create a compacted foundation pad, and built a new house with identical wall alignments directly on top of the ancestral footprint.

When James Mellaart excavated more than 160 rooms in the 1960s, he interpreted the most richly decorated rooms as specialized "shrines" presided over by a priestly class. Ian Hodder's high-resolution micro-morphological excavations (incorporating flotation, phytolith, and faunal floor sampling) demonstrated instead that every "shrine" was a fully functioning residential house where families cooked, slept, and knapped obsidian, but that certain long-lived lineages—termed "History Houses"—accumulated up to 30–62 intramural sub-floor burials and elaborate symbolic installations over four or five rebuildings while provisioning several surrounding satellite houses:

1. Bucrania and Animal Part Installations: Although over 75% of the meat consumed daily at Çatalhöyük came from domesticated sheep (Ovis aries) and goats (Capra hircus), sheep and goats are virtually absent from the house art. Instead, the walls and platform curbs bristle with plastered skulls and massive horn cores (bucrania) of hunted wild aurochs (Bos primigenius), alongside wild boar mandibles, bear claws, vulture beaks, and weasel skulls embedded directly inside plaster breasts modeled on the walls.
2. Polychrome Wall Murals and Reliefs: Painted with mineral pigments—cinnabar (HgS), red and yellow ochre, malachite, azurite, and manganese/charcoal—wall murals depict geometric kilim-like textile patterns, rows of positive/negative handprints, headless human corpses being defleshed by giant black griffon vultures, and scenes of miniature bearded men baiting, teasing, and surrounding gigantic wild stags, boars, and aurochs prior to communal feasts.
3. Figurines and the "Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük": While the majority of the >2,000 small clay and stone figurines found in middens depict zoomorphic quadrupeds or schematic genderless humanoids, the late levels (~6300–6000 BCE) yielded corpulent female figurines—most famously the terracotta Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük flanked by two felines (leopards) found inside a grain bin in Building 1—reflecting household fertility, aging elder authority, and abundance in the late settlement phases.

Situated inside a mosaic wetland and seasonal marsh formed by the Çarşamba alluvial fan, Çatalhöyük combined dryland agriculture on surrounding marl hummocks with wetland foraging:

• Archaeobotany & Zooarchaeology: Residents cultivated domesticated emmer, einkorn, naked six-row barley, free-threshing hexaploid wheat, lentils, bitter vetch, and peas, while gathering wild hackberries (Celtis), acorns, pistachios, and marsh club-rush (Bolboschoenus) tubers. Domesticated sheep and goats were herded across the Konya steppe (confirmed by strontium isotope ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr signatures in sheep tooth enamel), while wild cattle were domesticated locally only in the upper levels of the East Mound (~6500–6200 BCE).
• Cappadocian Obsidian Craftsmanship: In the absence of local flint, Çatalhöyük procured volcanic obsidian from the twin volcanoes of Göllü Dağ and Nenezi Dağ in Cappadocia (~190 km northeast), pressure-flaking exquisite bifacial projectile points, daggers with carved bone handles, and polished obsidian mirrors placed in female burials.
• Mineral-Tempered Ceramics & Lipid Residues: Beginning around 6700 cal BCE, grit-tempered, thin-walled dark burnished cooking pots replaced earlier Pre-Pottery Neolithic heated clay balls (which had been dropped glowing-hot into waterproofed baskets to boil stews). Gas chromatography–combustion–isotope ratio mass spectrometry (GC-C-IRMS) of absorbed lipids in Çatalhöyük potsherds documents both ruminant adipose fat (mutton/beef stews) and early dairy fat processing.

Over 750 human skeletons excavated from beneath the house platforms of Çatalhöyük provide an pronounced bioarchaeological archive of Neolithic life (Larsen et al., 2019):

• Dietary and Labor Gender Symmetry: Stable carbon (δ¹³C) and nitrogen (δ¹⁵N) isotope values of bone collagen, skeletal stature, paleopathological stress markers, intramural burial location, and soot/anthracosis deposits on the inner surfaces of ribs (caused by inhaling hearth smoke inside the windowless houses) are statistically indistinguishable between males and females, indicating notably egalitarian gender relations in diet, indoor/outdoor work, and mortuary status.
• Crowding, Zoonoses, and Workload Osteoarthritis: High population density inside agglutinated mudbrick houses surrounded by animal dung middens elevated juvenile diarrheal/parasitic stress (cribra orbitalia and periosteal tibial lesions), while 3D cross-sectional geometry of femora and tibiae shows increasing terrestrial mobility in the late levels (~6300–5950 BCE) as soil depletion and aridification forced herders and farmers to walk much farther from the mound.
• Ancient Genomes and "Practical Kinship": notably, both dental non-metric biodistance studies (Pilloud & Larsen, 2011) and whole-genome ancient DNA sequencing of dozens of neonates and sub-adults buried beneath the same house floors (Chyleński et al., 2019; Yaka et al., 2021) revealed that most individuals buried together inside a single Çatalhöyük house were not close first- or second-degree biological relatives. Instead, neonates from multiple biological families across the community were fostered, adopted, or affiliated into shared corporate "History Houses" defined by social and ritual residence rather than strict biological descent.

1. Mellaart, J. (1967). Çatal Hüyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia. London: Thames & Hudson. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00033731
2. Hodder, I. (2006). The Leopard's Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük. London: Thames & Hudson. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774307000145
3. Bayliss, A., Brock, F., Farid, S., Hodder, I., Southon, J., & Taylor, R. E. (2015). Getting to the bottom of it all: A Bayesian approach to dating the start of Çatalhöyük. Journal of World Prehistory, 28(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10963-015-9083-7
4. Larsen, C. S., Knüsel, C. J., Haddow, S. D., Pilloud, M. A., Milella, M., Sadvari, J. W., ... & Glencross, B. (2019). Bioarchaeology of Neolithic Çatalhöyük reveals fundamental transitions in health, mobility, and lifestyle in early farmers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(26), 12615–12623. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1904345116