March 2021, ScientificAmerican.com 71it’s like instant soup!” Perfect for a hot meal at home on a cold
winter day, when nobody wants to go outside to farm or hunt.THE CLAY BALL MYSTERY
crafters at ÇatalhöyüK had other laborsaving tricks as well.
Roughly 8,500 years ago, centuries after the city’s founding, fired
pottery was invented—and it was as revolutionary for Neolithic
cooks as microwaves were for impatient, hungry people in the
1970s. Before the rise of ceramics, cooking was a labor-intensive
process. University of Massachusetts Amherst anthropologist
Sonya Atalay found evidence that stews were made in watertight
woven baskets. You put your water and ingredients into the bas-
ket and heated it with large stones or clay balls heated in the fire.
When the balls cooled, you took them out and replaced them with
hot ones. It was no doubt a tiresome process, especially after a
long day of gathering food and water.
Atalay’s portrait of preceramic kitchen life came from two
sources of evidence. First, there are a few modern people who
still cook with heated stones because it is part of their cultural
traditions. And second, the settlement of Çatalhöyük is simply
bursting with piles of large clay balls, about the size of grapefruits,
that are covered in scorch marks from fires. Some houses have
hundreds of them, scattered in and around hearths. To Atalay, it
seemed obvious that these clay balls were cooking stones.
After the rise of ceramics at Çatalhöyük, people mostly stopped
making large clay balls and woven cooking baskets. Because ce-
ramic pots are heat-resistant, they could be put on stands over
the fire to simmer stews all day. It must have felt incredibly lux-
urious to cook without constantly juggling hot clay balls.
There is just one problem with this story. When scientists an-
alyzed these clay balls for lipids and proteins akin to the ones
found on Rosenstock’s bowls, they found nothing. It would ap-
pear the balls were heated and clearly used in the kitchen, but
they were not ever submerged in food. So what were they for?
Lucy Bennison-Chapman, an archaeology researcher at Leiden
University in the Netherlands, spent years analyzing the balls and
made some surprising discoveries. Although she does not com-
pletely rule out their use in stews, she thinks that is extremely
unlikely—they were simply too big and would have shed bits of
clay and dirt into the food. She also dismisses the possibility that
they were weapons. “They’re different from sling missiles,” she
says. “They’re smaller and generally a different shape.”
Instead she thinks the large balls were heaters. In some cases,
they were used to line the bottoms of ovens to hold warmth. They
could also have been the Stone Age equivalent of heating trays—
people might have pulled the balls from the fire, covered them in
reed mats and placed food on top. There is yet another possibil-
ity, which will be familiar to anyone who has read a Charles Dick-
ens novel where someone puts heated bricks in their bed at night.
“On the Konya Plain, it gets really cold in winter. You could heat
them and use them as a body warmer. Or you could wrap them
in linen and put them in your bedding,” Bennison-Chapman ex-
plains. “People worked on rooftops and in the fields, so you could
place heated balls in your pockets while you were outside. This
would explain why they were reheated and reused so often.”
Making these multifunctional balls was incredibly time-con-
suming. “They would have spent a long time going over them
with their hands, smoothing them,” Bennison-Chapman says.
“They’re covered in fingerprints.” Perhaps because it took so long
to make them, the balls were used over and over, reheated in the
fire until they were cracked. Most balls found at Çatalhöyük have
been reduced to fragments. Some were recycled and turned into
packing material in mud bricks or were placed between walls,
perhaps for insulation.
Clay balls also figure importantly at Çatalhöyük for another
reason. In addition to the big heaters, residents made miniature
clay balls, which were occasionally decorated with dots and oth-
er patterns. These mini balls, or tokens, are the earliest examples
at Çatalhöyük of “counting pieces,” named by archaeologists who
believed they were for simple record keeping or tallying up re-
sources. Bennison-Chapman cautions, however, that tokens were
not purpose-built for counting—they probably served as gaming
pieces, weights, ritual objects and even just decoration. Still, the
tokens show that domestic life was not simply focused on cook-
ing and staying cozy. Crafting objects at Çatalhöyük would even-
tually lead to counting and written language.NO PLACE LIKE HOME
the neolIthIc was a period of rapid change for humanity, espe-
cially when it came to defining what it meant to be at home. Be-
fore about 12,000 years ago, very few people lived in agricultur-
al settlements year-round—most were nomadic or seminomad-
ic, living in small groups as hunter-gatherers who moved from
site to site according to seasonal changes in food availability. So
when people finally did begin to build permanent houses and
form larger settlements, they had to figure out new ways of liv-
ing in one place, cheek by jowl with their neighbors.
Mostly they did it by building those homes together—sharing
the backbreaking labor but also the joys of community. John S.
Allen, an anthropology researcher at Indiana University Bloom-
ington, is author of the 2015 book Home: How Habitat Made Us
Human. “A home is a space you have an emotional attachment to,
through habitual use,” he says. Humans create homes by forming
an association between their community and a specific place, he
adds. This might be one reason graves at Çatalhöyük lay just be-
low the floors of homes. “A burial signifies a special place for fam-
ily and friends,” Allen suggests, underscoring the idea of a home
as an emotional space as well as a practical one.
When Rosenstock described all the foods that people ate at
Çatalhöyük, one topic came up again and again: her intense con-
viction that sooner or later she and her colleagues will find evi-
dence for beer. Partly that is because archaeologists have found
evidence of beer production in other Neolithic cultures around
the world. But it is also because there is so much evidence for
merrymaking at Çatalhöyük. “They have massive amounts of pot-
tery—they’re creating and discarding it like crazy. You can’t help
but think they were eating and smashing the pots,” she says. They
also threw away bones that still had meat on them, as if they were
feasting and drinking.
Building a city is not all about work. It’s about parties, too.
Perhaps, at the dawn of city life, working and partying were two
sides of the same coin: they were the tissues that knit us togeth-
er in a single place we came to know as home.FROM OUR ARCHIVES
Women and Men at Çatalhöyük. Ian Hodder; January 2004.
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