This Old House 



At (^atalhbyuk, a Neolithic site in Turkey, 



families packed their mud-brick houses close together 



and traipsed over roofs to climb into their rooms from above. 



By Ian Hodder 



Every summer since 1 993 I have returned to 

 central Turkey to work on the archaeologi- 

 cal 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 abun- 



Wall painting, some 8,500 years old, was discovered by the 

 English archaeologist James Mellaart in the 1960s, during his 

 excavations of the Turkish site of Qatalhbyuk. In Mellaart's in- 

 terpretation of the painting, the foreground shows a town, 

 possibly Qatalhbyuk itself, with the eruption, in the back- 

 ground, of a twin-peaked volcano, perhaps Hasan Dag (see 

 map on page 44). Mellaart's reconstruction of the painting 

 appears at the top of this page. 



dant 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 archaeolog- 

 ical 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 larg- 

 er one became known locally as (^atalhoyiik (pro- 

 nounced approximately cha-tal-HU-yuk), which 

 means "fork mound." The archaeological site has 

 adopted that name. 



(^atalhoyiik was first identified and excavated in 

 the late 1950s and early 1960s by the English ar- 

 chaeologist 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 var- 

 ious levels. Each building probably housed a fami- 

 ly 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 inter- 

 est, because it meant that very early firming villages 



4? 



NATURAL HISTORY June 2006 



