Çatalhöyük

← Encyclopedia

On the flat Konya Plain of south-central Anatolia, where the land runs to the horizon and the cone of a dead volcano breaks the skyline to the northeast, two low mounds rise out of a former marsh. The larger of them holds roughly a thousand years of human dwelling stacked house upon house: eighteen levels of mudbrick building raised, lived in, filled, and built over again between about 7400 and 6000 BCE. This is Çatalhöyük, among the largest and densest settlements the Neolithic world produced — at its height a community of several thousand people, by some estimates climbing toward ten thousand, packed onto a single swelling mound of some thirteen hectares. It is one of the earliest places where human beings lived in such numbers, in one spot, for so long, and it has become the central test case for what settled life did to the people who first took it up.

The name is modern and descriptive: in Turkish çatal is “fork” and höyük is the kind of artificial mound, a tell, that accumulates where a settlement is rebuilt for generations on its own collapsed remains. The site is two such mounds — an eastern tell holding the long Neolithic sequence and a smaller western tell of later, Chalcolithic occupation that carries the story down toward 5600 BCE. What the people called the place, and what language they spoke, is unknown; they left no writing, several thousand years before the first script would be pressed into clay downstream in Mesopotamia. Everything reconstructed about them is read from the ground: from their walls, their floors, their dead, and the images they painted and modeled and then, with strange consistency, buried.

A town with no streets

The most arresting fact about Çatalhöyük is the shape of the settlement itself. The houses were built directly against one another, wall sharing wall, with no streets, no lanes, and no doors at ground level between them. The town was a single agglutinated mass — a honeycomb of rooms — and the way into a house was from above. People walked across the rooftops, which formed the true public surface of the community, and descended into each dwelling by a wooden ladder through an opening in the roof, an opening that doubled as the smoke-hole for the hearth set beneath it. The dead-ground spaces left between clusters of houses served as middens, refuse tips, and animal pens; movement, daylight, and the common life of the place all happened on the roof.

This was not a village that had simply grown large. It was a distinctive social form, and one that resists the assumptions usually carried into the study of early towns. The houses are remarkably uniform. None is conspicuously larger or richer than its neighbors; none has been identified as a palace, a chief’s hall, a granary controlled by an elite, or a temple set apart from the dwellings. There is no central plaza, no monumental gate, no public building of any kind that the long excavations have been able to name as such. The household, repeated by the thousand and bound to its neighbors only by a shared roofline, appears to have been the whole of the social architecture — which makes Çatalhöyük, for all its size, profoundly unlike the city-state ladders of authority that Sumer would raise three thousand years later, with their ziggurats and palaces and kings. The contrast runs the other way too: where the slightly earlier monument-builders at Göbekli Tepe raised great carved enclosures and apparently did not yet live beside them as a settled town, Çatalhöyük is the inverse case — a place of dense, permanent, ordinary dwelling whose sacred life was folded entirely into the home rather than gathered into a sanctuary on the edge of it.

How that uniformity held — how a community of thousands kept self-aggrandizement in check without visible rulers — is one of the hard questions the site poses. Some houses do stand out, not by wealth but by depth of history: a minority of dwellings were rebuilt repeatedly on exactly the same footprint, kept their plastered features longest, carried the densest decoration, and held by far the most burials beneath their floors. These the excavators named history houses, proposing that they anchored the memory of the community — not centers of power over food or labor, but stores of accumulated continuity, lineage made architecture.

The painted interior

To enter a Çatalhöyük house was to drop into a single main room, its walls finished in fine white plaster and replastered, in some buildings, scores of times across the building’s life. Platforms ran along the northern and eastern sides for sitting, working, and sleeping; an oven and hearth sat under the roof entry; bins and side rooms held grain and stores. Into this domestic interior the inhabitants worked a symbolic program of extraordinary density, and then lived inside it.

Some walls were painted. The murals that survive show running hunters surrounding enormous wild animals — a great red bull, a stag, a boar — figures swarming around the beast with their limbs flung out, sometimes apparently dancing. One celebrated panel shows large birds, read as vultures, stooping over small headless human figures: a scene that has been tied, plausibly, to the treatment of the dead. Another, perhaps the most famous image from the site, sets a field of boxlike rectangles, read as the packed houses of the town itself, beneath a spotted, twin-peaked mountain that erupts overhead — frequently described as the oldest landscape painting and the oldest map, and identified by many with the nearby volcano Hasan Dağ, whose slopes have yielded geological evidence of an eruption within the period the painting could record. Whether the rectangles are houses and the mountain a volcano, or whether the panel shows something else entirely — a leopard skin, an abstract design — is argued, and the argument has not closed; but the eruption of Hasan Dağ within living memory of the painters is now supported on independent geological grounds.

More striking even than the paint are the installations. Into the plaster walls and benches the inhabitants set the parts of animals: the actual horned skulls of wild cattle — bucrania — were mounted on walls and pillars, sometimes ranked in rows, their horns sheathed in plaster and projecting into the room. Benches were built with rows of cattle horns embedded along their edges. Modeled reliefs in plaster bulged from the walls — splayed figures with raised arms and legs, paired animals confronting each other, the molded breasts of women shaped over the embedded skulls and beaks of vultures, foxes, and weasels, so that an image of nurture concealed within it the hard remains of scavengers and predators. The wild bull, in horn and image, recurs more than any other motif. None of this was incidental ornament. It was structural to the house, layered into its very fabric, renewed when the house was replastered, and dismantled and buried when the house was finally closed.

The dead beneath the floor

The people of Çatalhöyük buried their dead inside their own houses, beneath the plastered platforms on which the living sat and slept. The grave was dug under the floor, most often the northern or eastern platform; the body, adult or child, was folded into a tightly flexed position and laid in, and the platform was sealed and replastered above it. A family went on living, eating, and sleeping directly over its dead. Across the life of a long-occupied house, generation after generation went down into the same floors, so that the most enduring dwellings hold dozens of burials stacked beneath them — the literal foundation of the “history house.”

The treatment of the dead was not uniform, and it was not finished at burial. Many interments are primary, the whole body laid down once. But a minority were disturbed and reopened, and from some the skull was removed after the flesh was gone, taken up out of the grave and kept in circulation among the living. A number of these retrieved skulls were coated in plaster that modeled the soft features of a face back onto the bone, painted with red ochre — and in at least one case with cinnabar — and replastered more than once before being redeposited. The most evocative such find is a plastered, ochre-painted skull cradled in the arms of a later burial, an old woman laid to rest holding a face from an earlier death. The exposed headless figures under the vultures in the wall paintings, and these defleshed and curated skulls, point together toward a death rite in which the body was given up, the bones reclaimed, and certain ancestors kept present in the house as plastered, painted, handled things. The dead were not sent away. They were kept underfoot and, in part, kept above ground.

The figurines and the goddess

No element of Çatalhöyük has carried more interpretive weight, or more controversy, than its modeled figures. The site has produced a large corpus of small figurines in clay and stone — animals, abstract forms, and human bodies, many of the human ones female and full-bodied. The most famous is a seated clay figure of a heavy woman enthroned between two felines, her hands resting on their heads, the whole found tucked in a grain bin. The man who first excavated the site in the 1960s read this figure, and the recurring female imagery around it, as the cult statue of a Great Mother Goddess, and built from it a sweeping reconstruction of Çatalhöyük as the center of a Neolithic mother-goddess religion — a vision that fused, in the decades that followed, with a wider mid-twentieth-century thesis of a primordial, peaceful, goddess-worshipping Old Europe, and made the site a place of pilgrimage for that idea.

That reading is no longer the consensus, and the grounds on which it has been revised are worth stating exactly, because the question is genuinely open rather than simply overturned. The long second campaign of excavation, running through the 1990s and 2000s, recovered figurines in far greater number and variety than the early work had — including animal figures, ambiguous forms, schematic bodies, and figures that are not clearly female at all — many of them not enshrined but discarded in middens and rubbish, handled and then thrown away. The seated woman between the felines, on this fuller evidence, is one form among many rather than the apex of a single cult; some of the heavy female figures may render age and accumulated status rather than maternity or divinity; and there is no temple, no shrine set apart, no altar where a goddess could be said to have been worshipped — the symbolic life was domestic through and through. The careful position now is that the prominence of the female form at Çatalhöyük is real and demands explanation, but that “mother goddess” is one interpretation among several, not a finding the material compels. The figurines may be deities, ancestors, charms, markers of status, objects made for a moment’s use and then released — and the honest state of the evidence holds these possibilities open rather than ranking one above the rest.

The female form does, however, keep returning from new directions. Bioarchaeology and ancient DNA have lately been brought to bear on the burials, and the picture that emerges is of households organized around the maternal line: people buried in the same building tend to be related through their mothers, female infants were laid to rest with markedly richer grave goods than males, and the residential pattern reads as a female-centered, matrilocal one — unusual against the broadly patrilocal grain of the later European Neolithic. This is not the old goddess thesis returned in a lab coat, and it settles nothing about what the figurines meant. But it does mean that the centrality of women at Çatalhöyük is not only a matter of disputed images; it is written, faintly, in the bones.

The shape of a settled life

What Çatalhöyük records, more clearly than almost any other place, is the moment when the long mobility of the Paleolithic gave way to the rootedness of the Neolithic — and what that cost and made. These were farmers and herders: they grew wheat and barley and pulses, gathered from the marsh and the hills, kept sheep and goats, brought wild cattle slowly under domestication across the centuries of the mound’s life, and reached out along trade routes that carried obsidian from the volcanoes of Cappadocia and beyond, the black glass worked into the blades found throughout the houses. They were not the first farmers, and the broad story of the farming revolution belongs to the Neolithic at large. What is particular to Çatalhöyük is the intensity with which a settled population folded the wild, the dead, and the sacred into the fabric of the ordinary house, and lived there, in the dark beneath the rooftops, among the horns and the buried ancestors, for a thousand years.

It is tempting to call such a place a city, and it has been — the oldest, on some tellings. The label fits its scale and its permanence and fails on everything that usually defines a city: it had no center, no rulers visible in the ground, no public works, no division into rich and poor quarters, no writing, no temples set above the homes. The institutions that Sumer and the Indus cities and the later Minoan palaces would build — kingship, priesthood, the monumental sacred precinct, the recorded account — are exactly what Çatalhöyük lacks. Its order was held some other way: by the house, by the dead under the floor, by the cult of bull and bone renewed on the walls, and by whatever bound thousands of equal households into a single packed mound for forty generations. The mound was not abandoned in catastrophe so much as outgrown and let go, its people dispersing into smaller settlements as the long Neolithic world reorganized around them. What it leaves is the fullest portrait we have of the first kind of crowded, permanent, image-saturated human life — settled existence in its earliest dense form, with the wild brought indoors and the ancestors never sent away.

Recovery and scholarship

Çatalhöyük entered the modern record in 1958, when survey on the Konya Plain identified the mound; systematic excavation by a British archaeologist followed in four seasons from 1961 to 1965, and produced both the discovery’s fame and its first, goddess-centered interpretation. That campaign was cut short, and the site lay largely untouched for a quarter-century. The foundational publication of the early work remains James Mellaart’s Çatal Hüyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia (1967), the book that introduced the painted shrines and the mother-goddess thesis to a wide readership. A long second campaign — the Çatalhöyük Research Project, directed by Ian Hodder from 1993 to 2018 and built around an unusually reflexive, multidisciplinary method — re-excavated the site, recovered the far larger and more ambiguous body of evidence that reshaped its interpretation, and made the project’s data and annual archive reports publicly available at catalhoyuk.com. Hodder’s general account of the second campaign’s findings, The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük (2006), is the standard narrative synthesis, and his edited volumes on the emergence of symbolic and religious life pursue the question of what the house, the bull, and the buried dead were doing in the minds of the people who made them.

The site has remained a live laboratory. The identification of the volcano in the contested town-plan mural with an eruption of Hasan Dağ has been argued on geological grounds in the open-access study by Schmitt and colleagues, “Identifying the Volcanic Eruption Depicted in a Neolithic Painting at Çatalhöyük” (2014). The reopening of the goddess question on the fuller figurine evidence is laid out in the work of the project team and reviewed in studies such as those collected around the site’s reassessment of Mellaart and Gimbutas. Most recently, the analysis of ancient DNA from the burials has put the social organization of the settlement on a new footing: Eren Yüncü and colleagues, in “Female lineages and changing kinship patterns in Neolithic Çatalhöyük” (Science, 2025), drew on more than a hundred ancient genomes to argue for maternal-line household continuity and a female-centered residential pattern across the East Mound’s long sequence — evidence that bears on the figurine debate without resolving it. The mound was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2012, recognized for the testimony it gives to the earliest dense settled life and for the unbroken record, eighteen levels deep, of a community that built its world inside its houses and kept its dead beneath its feet.

→ Related: Neolithic · Paleolithic · Mesopotamia · Sumer · Indus Valley Civilization · Minoan Civilization · Cult