Area 842
Main Information
| Area ID | 842 |
| Site |
Çatalhöyük |
| Area type | settlement |
| Area NR | |
| Period | Anatolia: Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Anatolia: Pre-Pottery Neolithic C Anatolia: Early Neolithic Anatolia: Middle Neolithic Anatolia: Late Neolithic Anatolia: Early Chalcolithic |
| Dating method | material culture |
| Radiocarbon dated | None |
| Earliest date: Lab Number | |
| Earliest date: 14C age (BP) | |
| Earliest date: Calibration | None |
| Earliest date: 14C age calibrated (BC) | |
| Earliest date: Date of calibration | None |
| Earliest date: Standard deviation | None |
| Earliest date: Delta 13C | None |
| Earliest date: Dated by | |
| Latest date: Lab Number | |
| Latest date: 14C age (BP) | |
| Latest date: Calibration | None |
| Latest date: 14C age calibrated (BC) | |
| Latest date: Date of calibration | None |
| Latest date: Standard deviation | None |
| Latest date: Delta 13C | None |
| Latest date: Dated by | |
| Period Reference |
Özdoğan, Mehmet, The Neolithic in Turkey. New Excavations & New Research. Central Turkey, None, None Hodder, I., Renewed work at Çatalhöyük; Istanbul 2012, None, None |
| Comment | Çatalhöyük dates from the PPNB to the Early Chalcolithic (between ca. 7500 and 5500 cal. BC) |
| Settlement type | tell |
| Settlement structure |
houses: agglutinated |
| Settlement building type | |
| Settlement building shape | |
| Settlement building technique |
mud brick plaster wall plastered threshold |
| Settlement archaeological features |
bench clay floor clay platform hearth oven pit plastered floor storage building storage vessel wall painting waste pit |
| Cave/rockshelters type | None |
| Cave/rockshelters: Evidence of graves/human remains | |
| Cave/rockshelters: Evidence of occupation | |
| Quarry exploitation type | None |
| Quarry raw material | |
| Cemetery/graves topography | |
| Cemetery/graves mortuary features | |
| Grave: number of graves | |
| Grave type |
chamber grave none recorded pit grave |
| Grave: type of human remains |
inhumation secondary deposition |
| Grave: estimated number of individuals | |
| Grave: age groups |
adult age not specified neonate |
| Grave: sexes |
female individuals male individuals sex not specified |
| Grave: number of female sex | None |
| Grave: number of male sex | None |
| Grave: number of not specified sex | None |
| Grave: disturbance of graves | |
| Description | The site was first excavated by James Mellaart between 1961 and 1965, mainly in the southwest corner of the East Mound and in two trenches in the Chalcolithic West Mound. Çatalhöyük East is about 13,5 ha big and 21 m high. Most of the houses contained wall paintings (similar ones found in Köşk Höyük) and a huge amount of art. The floors had mostly lime-rich clay plaster (very soft --> continual resurfacing needed, done annually or even monthly); the wall plasters and floors were resurfaced with very thin layers , so in 20 cm of floor/wall there were up to 450 layers of replasterings; the middens were also very finely layered with individual dumps of refuse; the paintings were covered over when the buildings were abandoned, and the ovens and internal features were filled with earth, the upper walls were demolished while the lower half of the houses were often filled with clean soil (--> well preserved!), and new houses were built with the lower half of the previous walls as a base. The houses were so densely built that one could move around the settlement on the roofs, and the entrances to the houses also were in the roofs (the same hole was also used for smoke-escape from the hearths and ovens); on the East Mound there were 3500 - 8000 inhabitants estimated. The architectural layout of the households in the Aceramic Neolithic is described as "static honeycomb". There were 18 occupational levels with houses, animal pens, areas of refuse and burials within houses. All the buildings are called "domestic", but some houses were more elaborated (more times rebuilt, more burials beneath the floors) --> "history houses"; animal and human body parts were passed down, and the buildings held memories of important events (e.g. killing of wild animals, feasts with wild bulls), but the "history houses" didn't have more storage than the other houses and didn't control production or craft specialization, and the burials beneath the floors weren't richer --> highly egalitarian society; The Neolithic East Mound was divided in two hills (a large dip or trough ran across the middle), so it developed into two halves; large scale of groupings of houses in some levels, also large areas of adjacent houses without grouping --> "streets" between houses, alleyways or boundaries between "sectors" of the mound; the alleyways were used for traffic (but no heavy traffic; sometimes they were very narrow), refuse (dumped off the edges of roofs), and a wide range of activities (e.g. cooking, food processing). There were smaller groupings of houses within and cutting across these sectors, e.g. groups of houses buried their dead in the ancestral history houses (e.g. Building 1 had 62 burials beneath the floor), some burials were secondary depositions (relocated from elsewhere) --> there were more people buried there than lived inside one house --> houses were connected by shared burial places, and they also shared food preparation, consumption, use of distinctive forms of architecture and styles of painting; but the buried people were not more closely related than those in the population as a whole, therefore the kinship was not the sole basis of social affiliation; burials created links between buildings; the size of the buildings increased over time and became two-storey houses. The early houses consist of a main room with one to three side rooms (used for storage and food preparation), in upper levels and in the West Mound there were multi-roomed complexes later. The walls in the main rooms were replastered more frequently and usually contain an entrance ladder or stairs on the south wall, the hearth and oven were beneath the ladder. The northern floors were higher, whiter and cleaner, more frequently replastered; above and beneath the northern platforms are paintings, sculptures, installations and burials. Neonate and child burials were also near the ovens/hearths in the south part of main rooms and side rooms. There was a different density of different types of material in- and outside of houses, e.g. in midden areas. Faunal material, figurines and ceramics occur in higher densities outside houses because the insides were kept clean, the floors were carefully swept, they were artifact-sparse (unlike the middens); few traces of manufacturing activities were found through micromorphology inside houses. In winters, the activities were probably moved into houses (otherwise they probably took place on the roofs); a wide range of plants were stored inside in small quantities, glumed wheats were stored in the husk and then taken out, dehusked and cooked as needed inside the house. There was abundant phytolith evidence of cooking and processing of cereals inside houses. Pottery was used for plant and animal bone processing, in the upper levels it was used for heating milk products (from cattle). It is assumed that it was very bright inside the houses (much light came in from the ladder entrance, and the rooms had white plastered walls that were frequently renewed and often burnished to reflect light even to small rooms). The rooms probably were smoky (there were layers of soot on plaster walls --> frequent replasterings necessary to maintain light reflections). Also, several individuals (most of the older people) buried beneath the floors had carbon residues on their ribs. There is no evidence for good air draft in the houses. The main room in Building 5 had over 450 fine white silty clay plaster layers on the walls, the adjacent rooms were plastered only 3-4 times with orange and brown silt loam plasters. The floors of the main rooms were usually divided into platforms/ areas of different heights. The higher ones have white plaster, and different floor areas are demarcated by raised edges. In Building 1 there is phytolith evidence for different types of matting on different platforms; platforms are linked with burials --> the main burial platforms seem to be those with white laid plaster floors. Few adult burials, but more neonates occurred beneath occupation floors. None of these burials contained whole vessels. Different categories of people were buried under different platforms --> e.g in Building 1 there were more young people buried beneath the northwest platforms, and more older individuals under the central-east platform. The distribution of "art" and symbolism in a house respects the spacial divisions: paintings and sculptures are rarely found in the southern area of a house, bucrania are most common on the east and west walls, vulture paintings occur only on the north and east walls, and they also show headless corpses. Adult burials also were mostly beneath the platforms against the north and east walls --> spatial link between vultures and death Pattering of artifact distributions within houses, artifact and micro-artifact pattering indicate repeated differences between densities of bone and obsidian on different floor-types --> lower densities on higher, whiter floors away from the ovens and hearths, but high density (e.g. of lithics) on floors near the hearths ("occupation floors"). There was a very striking distinction in lithic and faunal densities between laid floors and occupation floors --> higher densities of botanical remains (mainly wood charcoal) in occupation floors, especially in "rake-out" deposits; there were different floor sediments in floors and platforms in different parts of the buildings, but the pattering in densities result from construction activities --> occupation material was incorporated into the plaster --> so maybe obsidian was worked near the hearths/ovens, but maybe the material was swept there from a nearby location. There was much change in the internal organisation of space within the buildings through time, e.g. the location of ovens and platforms changed in Building 1 and 5, in Building 2 the oven moved back and forth along the south wall (also similar in buildings 18 and 23), in Building 17 the white plastered burial platform in the northeast was periodically painted with red ocher and changed into a cooking area in Phase E --> the ovens were on the platforms in phase E, in the later phase B the ovens moved to the southwest corner. In Building 1 the use of the central-east platform changed (from a red-painted plaster with weed grass stem phytoliths to an unpainted floor covered with a sedge mat). But still, general tendencies in arrangement of activities get repeated. The "house" takes over many roles previously associated with the community at large --> burials were rarely outside of houses, symbolism and ritual centered in the house, food preparation and many productive activities concentrated in the house, storage was more house-based. There were different diets in different houses --> less sharing in resources than expected; there were also differences in the brick manufacture of adjacent houses. In the upper levels there were changes in construction and use of houses (changes continued into the Chalcolithic West Mound, from Level V onward, ca. 6500 cal. BC): the houses were less tightly clustered, more separate, less uniform, some buildings expanded (side rooms and yards were added), the houses became two-storey: the ground floor was used for storage and as production area, the upper floors were painted; burial declines or ceases inside buildings --> presumably there was e cemetery nearby. In the uppermost levels there was a decrease of emphasis on history-making, whereas in the lower and middle levels (up to the end of Level VI) the houses were involved in elaborate constructions of material histories --> hunter-gatherers lived in the present with little relationship to the past, but in the delayed return systems of the Neolithic people lived in a material world embedded in the past --> e.g. horns of wild cattle, heads of some people, some animal heads and some obsidian was kept. There was a repetition of paintings and relief sculpture from phase to phase and level to level in the buildings, e.g. a pair of relief leopards were found in five buildings, and in two cases (in Level VII house 44 and Level VI house 44) they were applied immediately above each other. There was also a circulation and use of various types of heads (wild animals, people, figurines): e.g. in Building 2 something was removed from the west wall of the main room --> maybe linked to the wild cattle horn found on the floor; there was a frequent pattern of destruction on the west walls of the main rooms in order to remove sculptures (e.g. heads, feet/hands of relief figurines with upraised arms were always removed before the infillings of buildings, but it is not known if they were reused or destroyed; reliefs similar to the animal head reliefs were also found in Köşk Höyük). Some reliefs had a phallic character: penises of stags, boars aund aurochs were shown; In Building 1 a pit was dug down to retrieve sculptures from the west wall after the building had been abandoned and filled in. Obsidian and bone points were left as "offerings" in the place of retrieval (similar deposits were made in a retrieval pit in Building 5). Human heads were removed from selected individuals and reused in foundation and abandonment deposits to commemorate the start and end of the use of a building. A human skull was found in the foundation deposit of Building 17 --> special link between skull deposits and upright structural timbers of the house; in Buildings 1 and 6 the head had been removed from buried, partly decayed bodies (adult males) --> removal of heads is shown in some wall art, maybe associated with people of a special status (elders, ritual leaders etc.) --> attempt to construct historical links between social groups and specific ancestors. In Building 42 were elaborate burials, e.g. one with a plastered skull (female) held in the arms of a complete skeleton, the plastered skull was painted red in the face and replastered several times, so it was used between the first plastering and final deposition. The same grave contained a leopard claw pendant (the first leopard bone found in 600 000 examined animal bones). The plastered bones from Çatalhöyük are distinctive from others: the eyes were not indicated, the skull was deposited singly rather than in a group --> specific links with particular ancestors? In the South Area, the Buildings 65, 56, 44 and 10 (a sequence of buildings, built on top of each other, sequence from bottom to top) were founded on a location with a cluster of child burials. Approx. at the time of abandonment of Building 65, the teeth and some bones were removed from a burial beneath the eastern platform, the teeth were then redeposited in a grave under the eastern platform of Building 56, directly above the earlier building. Figurines were often found with their heads missing --> several times, they had detachable heads. There were special depositions of broken heads in Çatalhöyük. In Building 17 in the southeast corner of the main room was a hearth (rebuilt several times) and in the sealing deposits of one hearth was a broken figurine placed with the head and torso separate from each other --> deliberate, and in the same unit were remains of a young sheep from a single-event consumption. Two sub-phases of hearth reconstructions later there was a deposit of a broken figurine-head, placed directly over the earlier one (the head was also very similar to the earlier one, and both were different from other figurines found at the site). Other clay figurines with a separate head were found in the first Area of the site. Also stone figurines were found (more often with intact heads). Figurines were deposited to "do" something (e.g. create links with the past) and found in domestic refuse context, often very small and easily/quickly made (low-fired or partially fired; clay lumps or unfired clay-balls could have been involved in figurine manufacture; figurines were made often and quickly as a part of daily practices). Objects were used for protection against spiritual and social harm. Red paint and ocher in houses (almost all houses) was used to ward off evil spirits and protect decorated objects (e.g. sprinkled on burials and thresholds between rooms, o wall panels above floors, on benches, platforms and animal heads in plaster, on baskets and boxes). Geometric paintings had a similar function. Paintings in houses played a different role than installations and reliefs. They were visible only intermittently, the walls were white most of the time and only colorful for short periods with figurative or geometric paintings, but they were plastered over, e.g. the plaster in the main rooms was redone every month or at least every season --> the paintings were associated with intermittent events (?) in the building's or inhabitants' life cycle (e.g. initiation, birth, death,...). All excavated buildings had paintings at least at some point. Geometric paintings, e.g. in Building 1, functioned as spatial and temporal links between burials of young people --> the northwest platform in the main room was surrounded by paintings at some point, and beneath the platform were burials. In Building 49 there was a concentration of burials beneath the northwest platform and a concentration of paintings that had been renewed several times with different motifs (rectilinear, curvilinear; on one layer there was a row of painted hands). In Building 77 there was a burial platform in the northeast of the main room, and also paintings (e.g. a row of painted red hands); there also was a red-painted bucranium of a young calf in this area, and around the platform were two sets of wild bull horns plastererd into pedestals --> difficult to access and work on these platforms --> horns "protected" the burials beneath the platforms. This tradition continues into the uppermost levels on the East Mound, in the TP Area there was a tomb chamber that had an incised wavy-lined decoration around the walls. Red ocher was used for protection inside the grave, and there was a great concentration of beads (different materials, e.g. shell, bone, stone). Beads were especially found in juvenile or infant burials --> e.g. in Building 6 there was a burial of a baby with beads around the wrists and ankles --> beads stood for protection rather than status. Narrative paintings: mainly hunting, baiting and teasing scenes; occur only in the upper levels (Level V and above); also domestic cattle in the upper levels, but the paintings still show humans interacting with wild bulls and other wild male animals (the wild bull was preferred in feasting). Wild cattle was still present in the upper levels, but maybe the paintings remember/memorialize activities that were on the decline; maybe the larger and more dominant houses in the later part of the occupation of the site are based on status, not only on a large scale domestic production but also on links to past practices. Some scenes with animals show hunting, others baiting or teasing of wild bulls, deer, boar or bear --> interpreted as humans obtaining the spirits of the animals by touching their tongues, nostrils or tails; many people were involved, only some of them were bearded --> mythical scene? or real activities? feasting deposits --> wild bulls in connection to feasting; social competition through feasting as a central part in the process of domestication of plants and animals; roasting pits were found since the PPNA in open areas --> debris of feasting (public feasting in Anatolia since the mid 10th millennium cal. BC: roasting pits, large scale animal killing, e.g. at Musular). Public feasting in Çatalhöyük is assumed because or the size of the deposits and their nature --> deposits were found in fills between walls, with at least 5 cattle; extensive gnawing on bones outside of buildings, so feasting took place outside as public event, with wild male cattle and other animals (deer, pig). But there rarely were postcranial elements of these animals on site -->maybe because they were difficult to find around the site, and only trophies were brought back; cattle was probably more available, but maybe there were taboos for certain animals and parts on site (e.g. leopards: only one claw found) --> sharp, pointed, dangerous animal parts were used in art and installations: e.g. a bear paw was found with plaster attached to it in a side room to "Shrine 10" --> was it attached to the wall? It is known that other sharp parts were attached to walls (wild boar tusks, fox-teeth, weasel-teeth, cattle horns, vulture-beaks). Paintings were related to social events (initiation, feast where young people show their prowess in relation to dangerous animals); certain body parts were brought to the houses as memories of large-scale events, and maybe the animal skulls were then passed down. 8 pairs of wild goat horn cores were placed over a lentil bin in Building 1 --> did the wild "protect" the domestic? animals "protected" plants? There were large relief "splayed figures": they had human-like bodies, some had visible belly-buttons. The hands and heads were always broken off in abandonment; found heads:depict goddesses? felines? also wild animal teeth represented --> comparable with a stamp seal with the head and hind paws of a bear (?) shown; maybe the animals from the teasing scenes were already dead, and people were taking power from them by touching them (tongues, tails, ...); maybe birds were seen as messengers from the sky; |
| Comment |
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Finds in this Area