This old house: at Catalhoyuk, a Neolithic site in Turkey, families packed their mud-brick houses close together and traipsed over roofs to climb into their rooms from above

Natural History, June, 2006 by Ian Hodder

Every summer since 1993 I have returned to central Turkey to work on the archaeological excavation of a mound nearly seventy feet high. As I tread over its soil, I feel a tingling in my feet, knowing that buried beneath me are the abundant remains of a town inhabited from 9,400 until 8,000 years ago. Rising just 500 feet to my west is a second, smaller mound, which was occupied from about 8,000 until 7,700 years ago. The archaeological site made up of the two mounds is still no more than 5 percent exposed. Until the digs began, an old footpath made a fork at the mounds, and so the larger one became known locally as Catalhoyuk (pronounced approximately cha-tal-HU-yuk), which means "fork mound." The archaeological site has adopted that name.

Catalhoyuk was first identified and excavated in the late 1950s and early 1960s by the English archaeologist James Mellaart. His excavations revealed fourteen levels of occupation in the larger mound, created as people tore down old houses, filled them in, and built new ones on top. Altogether, Mellaart excavated about 160 buildings, spread over the various levels. Each building probably housed a family of between five and ten people. One main room was the locus of family living, cooking, eating, craft activities, and sleeping, and there were side rooms for storage and food preparation.

Mellaart's excavations turned up evidence that the people of Catalhoyuk made use of domesticated plants and animals. The finding excited wide interest, because it meant that very early farming villages grew up not only in the Levant and adjacent areas of the Middle East, where wild plants and animals were first domesticated, but also here, in Anatolia. But even more astonishing were some other distinctive characteristics of Catalhoyuk that Mellaart was the first to describe. The houses of Catalhoyuk were so tightly packed together that there were few or no streets. Access to interior spaces was across roofs--which had been made of wood and reeds plastered with mud--and down stairs. People buried their dead beneath the floors. Above all, the interiors were rich with artwork--mural paintings, reliefs, and sculptures, including images of women that some interpreted as evidence for a cult of a mother goddess.

Catalhoyuk was quite large for a town of Neolithic age--the time from about 11,500 to 8,000 years ago, when people began living in relatively permanent villages and making use of domesticated crops and animals. The population fluctuated between 3,000 and 8,000; in physical area the large mound encompassed some 33.5 acres. Unsurprisingly then, despite excavating for four years, Mellaart uncovered only a small part of the town. The current dig, which I direct, has excavated or determined the outlines of eighty more buildings and has identified four additional levels of occupation in the larger mound. Yet as I walk over that mound, I am well aware that thousands of buildings are still hidden beneath the soil, full of art and symbolism, waiting to be explored.

Archaeologists do know a lot more now than they did at the time of Mellaart's discovery about other Anatolian settlements dating from the Neolithic. But for any student of that era--myself included--Catalhoyuk and its mysteries hold a special appeal. What led to the concentration of art in so many houses at one site? Why was the settlement so large--what drew people to that particular place? And how much can be learned from what is perhaps the most intriguing feature of all about Catalhoyuk: that the site was built and rebuilt over the centuries in ways that provide an unusually rich record of the minutiae of daily life?

The main reason for the abundance of the archaeological record was that the Catalhoyukans used a particular kind of construction material. Instead of making hard, lime floors that held up for decades (as was the case at many sites in Anatolia and the Middle East), the inhabitants of Catalhoyuk made their floors mostly out of a lime-rich mud plaster, which remained soft and in need of continual resurfacing. Once a year--in some cases once a month--floors and wall plasters had to be resurfaced. Those thin layers of plaster, somewhat like the growth rings in a tree, trap traces of activity in a well-defined temporal sequence. The floors even preserve such subtle tokens of daily life as the impressions of floor mats. Middens are just as finely layered, making it possible to identify details as subtle as individual dumps of trash from a hearth.

When a house reached the end of its practical life, people demolished the upper walls and carefully filled in the lower half of the house, which then became the foundation for new walls of a new house. The mound itself came into being largely through such gradual accumulation. Taking it apart enables us to revisit the past.

Catalhoyuk lies in the Konya Basin, which in Neolithic times was mostly a semiarid plain with steppe vegetation: grasses, sedges, and small bushes [see map on next page]. The soil, the residue from a vanished lake, was made up of marls--deposits of clay with high levels of calcium carbonate. Its consistency and low nutrient value made the soil unsuitable for early forms of agriculture. The basin, however, included some marshy areas, several rivers, and, perhaps, some small, shallow, seasonal lakes. In any event, there were deposits of alluvial soil that were more hospitable than the marls to early farmers and herders.