grew up not only in the Levant and adjacent areas of 

 the Middle East, where wild plants and animals were 

 first domesticated, but also here, in Anatolia. But even 

 more astonishing were some other distinctive char- 

 acteristics of ^atalhoyiik that Mellaart was the first 

 to describe. The houses of (^atalhoyiik were so tight- 

 ly packed together that there were few or no streets. 

 Access to interior spaces was across roofs — which had 

 been made of wood and reeds plastered with mud — 

 and down stairs. People buried their dead beneath 

 the floors. Above all, the interiors were rich with art- 

 work — mural paintings, reliefs, and sculptures, in- 

 cluding images of women that some interpreted as 

 evidence for a cult of a mother goddess. 



| atalhoyiik was quite large for a town of Neolithic 

 ^5"- / age — the time from about 1 1 ,500 to 8,000 years 

 ago, when people began living in relatively perma- 

 nent villages and making use of domesticated crops 

 and animals. The population fluctuated between 

 3,000 and 8,000; in physical area the large mound en- 

 compassed some 33.5 acres. Unsurprisingly then, de- 

 spite excavating for four years, Mellaart uncovered on- 

 ly a small part of the town. The current dig, which I 

 direct, has excavated or determined the outlines of 

 eighty more buildings and has identified tour addi- 

 tional levels of occupation in the larger mound. Yet 

 as I walk over that mound, I am well aware that thou- 

 sands of buildings are still hidden beneath the soil, full 

 of art and symbolism, waiting to be explored. 



Archaeologists do know a lot more now than they 

 did at the time of Mellaart's discovery about other 

 Anatolian settlements dating from the Neolithic. But 

 for any student of that era — myself 

 included — (^atalhoyiik and its mys- 

 teries hold a special appeal. What led 

 to the concentration of art in so 

 many houses at one site? Why was 

 the settlement so large — what drew 

 people to that particular place? And 

 how much can be learned from what 

 is perhaps the most intriguing fea- 

 ture of all about Qatalhoyiik: that the 

 site was built and rebuilt over the 

 centuries in ways that provide an un- 

 usually rich record of the minutiae 

 of daily life? 



The main reason for the abun- 

 dance of the archaeological record 

 was that the Qatalhoyiikans used a 

 particular kind of construction ma- 

 terial. Instead of making hard, lime 

 floors that held up for decades (as was 

 the case at many sites in Anatolia and 

 the Middle East), the inhabitants of 



Catalhoyiik made their floors mostly out of a lime- 

 rich mud plaster, which remained soft and in need of 

 continual resurfacing. Once a year — in some cases 

 once a month — floors and wall plasters had to be 

 resurfaced. Those thin layers of plaster, somewhat like 

 the growth rings in a tree, trap traces of activity in a 

 well-defined temporal sequence. The floors even 

 preserve such subtle tokens of daily life as the im- 

 pressions of floor mats. Middens are just as finely lay- 

 ered, making it possible to identify details as subtle as 

 individual dumps ot trash from a hearth. 



When a house reached the end of its practical hfe, 

 people demolished the upper walls and carefully 

 filled in the lower half of the house, which then be- 

 came the foundation for new walls of a new house. 

 The mound itself came into being largely through 

 such gradual accumulation. Taking it apart enables 

 us to revisit the past. 



| atalhoyiik lies in the Konya Basin, which in Ne- 

 ^x-'olithic times was mostly a semiarid plain with 

 steppe vegetation: grasses, sedges, and small bushes [see 

 map on next page]. The soil, the residue from a van- 

 ished lake, was made up of marls — deposits of clay 

 with high levels of calcium carbonate. Its consistency 

 and low nutrient value made the soil unsuitable for 

 early forms of agriculture. The basin, however, in- 

 cluded some marshy areas, several rivers, and, perhaps, 

 some small, shallow, seasonal lakes. In any event, there 

 were deposits of alluvial soil that were more hospitable 

 than the marls to early farmers and herders. 



One of the rivers in the Konya Basin was the 

 C^ar^amba, which spewed out into the plain and did 



Excavations of the East Mound of Qatalhoyuk, done by Mellaart in the 

 1960s, show that the buildings on the 33.5-acre mound were packed 

 close together, without intervening streets or alleyways. Access to 

 house interiors was originally across the roofs and down a stairway. 



June 2006 natural HISTORY 



43 



