Çatalhöyük: Life in a 9,000-Year-Old Neolithic Town

Çatalhöyük was a large Neolithic settlement on the Konya Plain in central Turkey, occupied from about 7400 to 6200 BC, where thousands of people lived in tightly packed mud-brick houses entered through their roofs. Famous for its wall paintings, plastered bull horns and burials beneath house floors, it offers one of the most detailed pictures of daily life among early farmers anywhere in the world. It also challenges assumptions about early towns, because it seems to have functioned without palaces, temples or a clear ruling class.

Background: farming reaches central Anatolia

Çatalhöyük grew up during the later stages of the Neolithic Revolution, when farming had already been established for more than a thousand years in the Fertile Crescent to the south-east. Earlier villages in central Anatolia, such as Aşıklı Höyük, had already begun to cultivate cereals and manage sheep and goats.

The site lies near the modern town of Çumra, about 40 kilometres south-east of Konya. In the Neolithic, the area was a wetland plain crossed by the Çarşamba river, with marshes, seasonal flooding and fertile alluvial soils. Clay for building and reeds were close at hand, while the volcanic mountains of Cappadocia to the east supplied obsidian, a volcanic glass used for sharp tools and mirrors.

The name means “fork mound” in Turkish. There are two mounds: the larger East Mound, which holds the Neolithic town, and the smaller West Mound, occupied afterwards in the Early Chalcolithic period, roughly 6000–5500 BC.

Discovery and excavation

The British archaeologist James Mellaart identified the site during a survey in 1958 with David French and Alan Hall. He excavated it in four seasons between 1961 and 1965 and quickly made it world-famous through vivid reports of paintings, sculptures and shrines. His book Çatal Hüyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia appeared in 1967.

Mellaart’s excavations ended amid controversy, partly linked to the unrelated “Dorak affair”, a dispute over a supposed Bronze Age treasure that he claimed to have recorded. Turkish authorities did not allow him to resume work.

In 1993 the archaeologist Ian Hodder, then at the University of Cambridge and later at Stanford University, began a new international project. Running until 2017, it involved hundreds of specialists and used methods such as micromorphology, isotope analysis and ancient DNA to study the site house by house. In 2012 the “Neolithic Site of Çatalhöyük” was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

A town without streets

The East Mound covers about 13 hectares and rises about 20 metres above the plain, formed by around 18 successive levels of building over more than a thousand years. Population estimates for its peak range from about 3,500 to 8,000 people.

Houses entered from the roof

The houses were rectangular, built of sun-dried mud brick, and placed directly against one another, with no streets or lanes in between. People moved about on the flat roofs and climbed down into their homes by wooden ladders through openings that also let out smoke.

A typical house had a main room with a hearth and an oven near the ladder, raised platforms for sitting, working and sleeping, and smaller side rooms for storage. Walls and floors were coated with fine white plaster, which was renewed many times, sometimes yearly.

Rebuilding on the past

When a house went out of use, it was carefully emptied, partly filled in and used as the foundation for a new house of almost the same plan. Some houses were rebuilt in the same place many times. Hodder calls these long-lived buildings “history houses” and suggests they carried special importance as links to the ancestors.

Art, symbols and the dead

Çatalhöyük is known for some of the richest Neolithic art ever found inside houses.

Wall paintings and installations

Painted scenes on plastered walls show hunters surrounding huge wild bulls and deer, vultures flying around headless human figures, handprints and geometric patterns. One painting has been interpreted as a plan of the town with a twin-peaked volcano erupting above it, possibly Hasan Dağı, although some scholars think it shows a leopard skin instead.

Many houses contained bucrania: the horns and skulls of wild cattle set in plaster on walls or benches. Plastered reliefs of animals, including leopards facing one another, also decorated some rooms. Mellaart called the most elaborate rooms “shrines”, but later work showed that richly decorated rooms were ordinary houses where people also cooked and worked.

Burials beneath the floors

The dead were buried beneath the floors of houses, usually under the platforms, often in a tightly flexed position. Some houses held dozens of burials, and in many cases infants and children make up a large share of them. Personal ornaments such as beads were sometimes placed with the dead, but grave goods were generally modest. Occasionally skulls were removed and later reburied, and one woman was found holding a plastered and painted skull.

Figurines

Thousands of clay and stone figurines have been found, most of them animals or simple human forms. The best known is the “Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük”, a baked-clay figure of a large woman sitting between two felines, found by Mellaart in 1961 and now in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara.

Daily life and an egalitarian society

People at Çatalhöyük grew wheat, barley, peas and lentils and collected wild plants. They herded domestic sheep and goats, while cattle were mostly wild aurochs hunted for meat and feasts until domestic cattle appeared in the later levels (see the domestication of cattle).

One of the most striking conclusions of Hodder’s project is how similar households were. Houses were of roughly equal size, with no palace, central temple or clearly elite district. Analysis of skeletons showed that men and women ate similar diets, did similar kinds of work and were similar in height, and soot deposits on ribs suggest that both spent comparable amounts of time indoors near smoky hearths.

Life was not easy. Studies of the skeletons published in 2019 found evidence of crowding, infectious disease, heavy workloads and head injuries, some of them healed, suggesting episodes of interpersonal violence as the population grew.

In the later centuries of occupation, houses became more spread out and independent, and the population gradually moved to the West Mound and other sites. Changes in climate, including a cold, dry episode around 6200 BC, may have played a part.

Crafts and trade

The people of Çatalhöyük were skilled craftworkers. Obsidian from the volcanoes of Cappadocia, more than 150 kilometres away, was shaped into blades, arrowheads and polished mirrors, some of the earliest mirrors known. Flint, shells from the Mediterranean and other exotic materials also reached the town.

Pottery appeared early in the settlement’s history and became more common over time, gradually replacing baskets, wooden vessels and cooking with hot clay balls. People made fine bone tools, beads of stone and shell, and clay stamp seals carved with spirals and other designs, which may have been used to decorate textiles, bread or skin.

Textile fragments of plant fibre, probably made from the fibres of tree bark, survived in some burials. Together these finds show a community that produced most of what it needed at household level, while staying connected to wider exchange networks across Anatolia and beyond.

Unlike later urban centres, there is little evidence of full-time craft specialists or workshops controlled by a central authority. Most production seems to have taken place inside ordinary houses, in keeping with the town’s broadly equal social structure.

Myths and facts

Myth: Çatalhöyük was ruled by women and worshipped a Mother Goddess. Mellaart popularised this view, and it inspired modern Goddess movements. Later research found no clear evidence of female or male dominance, and most figurines are not obviously goddesses.

Myth: Çatalhöyük was the world’s first city. It was large and densely built, but it lacked the public buildings, social hierarchy and specialised districts associated with cities. Many archaeologists describe it as a very large village or proto-town.

Myth: All the famous paintings are well documented. Some reconstructions published by Mellaart late in his career, which no other excavator saw, are widely doubted, so specialists rely on paintings recorded during excavation.

Timeline

• c. 7400 BC: Settlement begins on the East Mound, according to commonly cited dates.
• c. 7000–6500 BC: The town reaches its peak size and density.
• c. 6500–6200 BC: Houses become more separate and the town begins to change.
• c. 6200 BC: Main occupation of the East Mound ends; settlement shifts to the West Mound.
• c. 6000–5500 BC: The West Mound is occupied in the Early Chalcolithic.
• 1958: James Mellaart identifies the site during a survey.
• 1961–1965: Mellaart excavates the East Mound.
• 1993–2017: Ian Hodder’s international project works at the site.
• 2012: Çatalhöyük is inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Why it matters

Çatalhöyük shows that thousands of early farmers could live together in one place for over a millennium without obvious rulers or social classes. Its houses, art and burials reveal a world in which daily life, ritual and the ancestors were closely bound together, and it remains a key site for understanding how settled farming communities, like those that spread west in the spread of farming into Europe, organised their lives.