Çatalhöyük

Çatalhöyük in context

The town that came after

Çatalhöyük is a vast Neolithic settlement on the Konya plain in central Anatolia, occupied from roughly 7100 to 5900 BCE — thousands of years younger than Göbekli Tepe. Its people lived in mud-brick houses packed so tightly that there were no streets; homes were entered through holes in the roof. The dead were buried beneath the house floors, and the walls carried painted scenes and plastered installations, including bull horns set into benches.

It was brought to fame by James Mellaart in the 1960s and re-excavated in detail by Ian Hodder from the 1990s, making it one of the most thoroughly studied Neolithic sites in the world.

Why it belongs beside Taş Tepeler

Çatalhöyük shows where the story went next. Where the Taş Tepeler sites were gathering places raised by hunter-gatherers, Çatalhöyük is fully settled village life, with ritual moved inside the home rather than out to monumental enclosures. It is the domestic sequel to the Taş Tepeler prologue — useful for seeing how far, and how fast, the Neolithic world changed.