Çayönü: Early Neolithic Village of Grill Houses and Copper

Çayönü Tepesi is an early Neolithic settlement mound in south-eastern Turkey, occupied mainly between about 8600 and 6800 BC. It is famous for its distinctive grill-plan buildings, for a ritual “Skull Building” containing the remains of hundreds of people and for some of the earliest worked native copper in the world. The site documents in rare detail how a community of the upper Tigris basin moved from hunting and gathering towards farming and herding.

Discovery and excavation

The mound lies near the town of Ergani in Diyarbakır Province, at the foot of the Taurus Mountains. Excavations began in 1964 as a joint project of Istanbul University and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, led by Halet Çambel and Robert J. Braidwood.

Braidwood had earlier excavated Jarmo in Iraq and was searching for the origins of farming in the “hilly flanks” of the Fertile Crescent. Work at Çayönü continued over many seasons until the early 1990s, later directed by Mehmet Özdoğan and Aslı Özdoğan. The long project made Çayönü one of the best-studied early Neolithic sites in Turkey.

A sequence of buildings

Archaeologists divide the Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlement into sub-phases named after the dominant type of building. The sequence runs roughly from round huts, through grill-plan, channelled and cobble-paved buildings, to cell-plan and finally large-room buildings.

The grill-plan buildings are the most distinctive. Their stone foundations consist of parallel low walls, like the bars of a grill, which probably carried a raised floor of timber and clay. This kept the building dry and ventilated, possibly to protect stored grain. Later cell-plan buildings had small rooms at foundation level, again probably for storage, beneath living spaces above.

This orderly, rectangular architecture, rebuilt in the same places over centuries, shows a community that planned its settlement and invested heavily in houses.

The Skull Building and other special buildings

Alongside houses, Çayönü had several special buildings. The most famous is the Skull Building, rebuilt a number of times during the settlement’s life. Its cellar-like chambers held the bones of more than 400 people, including many skulls stacked together. A large flat stone slab stood in one room.

Some researchers reported traces of human and animal blood on the slab and on tools, suggesting sacrifices or the processing of bodies, but these chemical findings have been questioned. The building is best understood as a place for the secondary treatment and storage of the dead, part of the widespread Neolithic veneration of skulls also seen at Jericho and other Levantine sites.

Another structure, the Terrazzo Building, had a polished floor made of pinkish limestone chips set in lime, an impressive technical achievement. A further open area, called the Plaza, held a row of standing stones.

Early copper

Çayönü lies about 20 km from the copper deposits of Ergani Maden, one of the richest in Anatolia. Its inhabitants collected native copper and green malachite and shaped them into beads, pins, hooks, awls and other small objects, probably during the ninth and eighth millennia BC.

Analysis shows that the copper was hammered and in some cases annealed, or gently heated to keep it workable, but not smelted from ore. True smelting appears only several thousand years later, at sites such as Belovode in Serbia around 5000 BC. Çayönü’s copper nonetheless shows that people experimented with metal long before the Copper Age.

Farming and herding

Plant remains show that the people of Çayönü cultivated einkorn, emmer, lentils, peas and vetch, part of the package described in Domestication of Wheat and Barley. Wild plants such as pistachios and almonds were also gathered.

Animal bones are especially important. In the early phases, people hunted wild boar, deer, wild cattle and wild sheep. Over the centuries, pig bones became smaller and the age profile of slaughtered pigs changed, suggesting a slow, gradual domestication of pigs at the site. Domesticated sheep and goats became dominant in the later phases. Çayönü is thus a key witness to the long process of the Neolithic Revolution.

The villagers also obtained obsidian, a volcanic glass, from sources in eastern Anatolia, showing that they were part of wide exchange networks.

Timeline

• c. 8600 BC: The Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlement at Çayönü begins with round buildings.
• c. 8500-8000 BC: Grill-plan buildings are constructed; native copper is worked.
• c. 8000-7500 BC: The Skull Building and Terrazzo Building are in use (approximate).
• c. 7500-7000 BC: Cell-plan buildings; domestic sheep and goats become important.
• c. 6800 BC: The Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlement comes to an end.
• 1964: Halet Çambel and Robert J. Braidwood begin excavations.

Why it matters

Çayönü shows an early farming community experimenting at once with architecture, ritual, animal husbandry and metal. Its long sequence of buildings and its early copper objects make it one of the most informative sites for understanding how the Neolithic way of life took shape in upper Mesopotamia.