68 Scientific American, March 2021
PRECEDING PAGES: JASON QUINLAN
Map by Mapping Specialists
Millennia before the rise of Mesopotamian cities to the south,
the proto-city Çatalhöyük (pronounced “Chah-tahl-hew-yook”)
thrived here. Sprawled over 34 acres and home to as many as
8,000 people, it was the metropolis of its day. People lived in this
community continuously for almost 2,000 years, before slowly
abandoning it in the 5,000s b.c.e. During its heyday, bonfires
from the many parties held at Çatalhöyük would have been vis-
ible far across the flat grasslands.
Unlike later cities, Çatalhöyük had no great monuments nor
any marketplaces. Think of it as a dozen agricultural villages that
grew together, forming what some researchers call a “mega site.”
People entered its thousands of tightly packed, mud-brick homes
through ceiling doors, and they navigated sidewalks that wound
around the city’s rooftops. They planted tiny farm plots around
the city. Whether they were fixing up their houses or making
clothes, tools, food and art, Çatalhöyük residents spent most of
their days between four walls, right next to their bed platforms—
or, in warmer months, on their roofs.
This was not exactly what archaeologists expected to find
when they first began excavating at Çatalhöyük in the early 1960s.
Based on what they knew of other ancient cities, these investi-
gators were primed to discover shrines, markets and priceless
loot. Instead they found the remains of home decor, cookware
and ritual items associated with domesticity rather than formal
churches. The mismatch between expectation and reality flum-
moxed Çatalhöyük researchers for decades. It took a new kind
of archaeologist to figure out what it all meant, piecing togeth-
er what life was really like when humans were transitioning from
a nomadic existence to a settled one as farmers and urbanites
with a strong sense of home.
DIDO’S HOUSE
In 2000 archaeologist Ruth Tringham of the University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley, traveled to Çatalhöyük to visit a house that
had not seen the light for thousands of years. Inside the struc-
ture she discovered the remains of a woman buried under a bed
platform. Tringham nicknamed her Dido and returned every
summer for the next several years with a team of researchers to
excavate Dido’s house. The group analyzed everything from the
animal figurines and bones found inside to the many layers of
plaster paint on its walls.
What they found was a household where everything was
made from scratch—including the scratch itself, as it were. It is
hard for modern people to imagine the intensity of the labor re-
quired to maintain a settled life back in Dido’s day.
If you wanted to cook dinner, you grew or hunted
the food, built your own oven, made cooking tools
such as obsidian knives, molded clay pots, then
started cooking. People made their own bricks,
built their own houses, wove mats for the floors out
of reeds and sewed their own clothes (and made
the needles, thread and textiles).
Even spirituality seems to have been hand-
crafted. People buried their loved ones under-
neath the floors, perhaps as a way to keep them
close, and reverently decorated their skulls with
plaster and paint. Archaeologists have found simi-
lar skulls at other sites dating to the Neolithic—
the time spanning 12,000 to 6,500 b.c.e. in the
Fertile Crescent—such as Jericho in the West Bank.
It appears to have been relatively common at this
T
he Konya PlaIn In central turKey Is a vast, elevated Plateau covered In small farms
and dusty fields, edged by dramatic mountain ranges that cast purple shadows. At
night, visitors can drive into the foothills and see distant city lights, shimmering like
a mirage. The view here has not changed much over the past 9,000 years—even the
illuminated metropolitan skyline would look familiar to a visitor from 7,000 B.C.E.
That is because the Konya Plain is one of the cradles of urban life.
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author based in
Irvine, Calif. Their latest book is Four Lost Cities: A Secret History
of the Urban Age (W. W. Norton, 2021).
Black Sea
Mediterranean Sea
TURKEY
SYRIA IRAQ
BULGARIA
GEORGIA
ARMENIA
RUSSIA
IRAN
Çatalhöyük
Antalya Adana
Istanbul
Ankara
Gaziantep
Erzincan
Batman
Konya
Plain
Trabzon
Kars
Izmir
Bursa
Samsun
CYPRUS
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