March 2021, ScientificAmerican.com 69JASON QUINLAN
(1, 2
); LAURA DI BIASE
Alamy Stock Photo
(^3 )
time to honor the dead by recreating their faces using plaster
applied to their skulls. At Çatalhöyük, people sometimes traded
these skulls with other families and reburied them at a later
time. Researchers often find several skulls buried alongside one
body, suggesting that these rituals linked kin to their homes
over several generations.
Archaeologists have found elaborate paintings on the interi-
or house walls that were refreshed every year in the same pat-
terns—as if generations of inhabitants wanted to keep the origi-
nal paintings intact. Some of these patterns are abstract designs
of swirls or zigzags, like the ancient equivalent of wallpaper.
Others invoke scenes of wild animals and hunters. There are
even some wall paintings that appear to shed light on the spiri-
tual underpinnings of the skull ritual: in one house, researchers
found a wall painting of headless bodies surrounded by vul-
tures, giving the impression that the birds are bearing people’s
spirits away.
Animal bones, too, adorn the homes. Nearly every house-
hold had its own wall-mounted “bucranium,” a plastered bull’s
skull painted deep red, its sharp horns pointing into the room.
People also hid claws and teeth from dangerous animals in the
mud brick of their walls in the way people today sometimes put
a lucky penny into the foundation of a house.
In the 1960s archaeologists were confounded by finding these
obviously symbolic, quasi-religious items mixed in with regular
household garbage. One early researcher, James Melaart, thought
the entire city must be a giant, mysterious shrine. But “it’s only a
mystery if you expect it to be something else, something bigger
and more complex,” Tringham says. Melaart and his colleagues
expected to find spiritual objects in grand temples, not in people’s
kitchens. Tringham always preferred to let the evidence speak for
itself, without preconceptions.
Stanford University archaeologist Ian Hodder, who led exca-
vations at Çatalhöyük until 2018, supported Tringham’s methods.
Traditionally archaeologists had studied artifacts by stealing
them from dig sites and bringing them back to museums. Hod-
der popularized the idea of “contextual archaeology,” which sug-
gests that we should understand artifacts not in isolation but by
thinking about how they fit into the place where they were dis-
covered. In the case of Çatalhöyük, contextual archae ology gave
researchers such as Tringham a frame work for interpreting why
there were sacred objects in the middle of living rooms. It was
because people were fashioning ritual spaces in their own homes.
In contrast to later cities, where separate spaces were built for
worship, work and domestic life, Çatalhöyük residents merged
them all together under one roof. That is why every house looked
like a combination of temple, workshop and bedroom. Hodder
believes that these multipurpose houses represent a key stage in
the process of human domestication, when many people stopped
leading nomadic lives and settled down to farm. At first, houses
were just places to sleep and work. But over time, as Hodder puts
it, people became “entangled” psychologically with their land—
you might say they went from being a bunch of farmers living on
Konya Plain to being Çatalites. The city was part of their identi-
ties, and they attributed a spiritual meaning to the places where
they lived. In the process, houses became homes. In cities built
later, there were separate spaces for worship, work and domestic
life—but the idea that the city was a home, and not just a resting
place, continued to endure.INSTANT SOUP IN THE NEOLITHIC
ÇatalhöyüK shows what everyday life was like at a time when
“home” was a radical new idea. Inhabitants had to do many jobs
to keep their houses and families intact, but they spent the most
time acquiring and making food. We know that they were agri-
culturalists, tending family farms and flocks of animals on the
fertile Konya Plain, which would have afforded them the stable
food supply they needed to live year-round in permanent homes.
They made a variety of cooking implements, from butcher’sMOST HOUSES at Çatalhöyük were decorated with animal bones
such as bull skulls ( 1 ). And elaborate paintings adorned the walls ( 2 ).
A recreated home shows how symbolic and domestic items merged
under one roof ( 3 ).123