Çatalhöyük

Çatalhöyük is a pair of settlement mounds on the Konya Plain in southern Anatolia, south-east of the city of Konya in Turkey. From roughly 7500 or 7100 BCE until about 5600 BCE farming people lived here in a densely packed town of mud-brick houses, rebuilding on the same spot generation after generation. It is one of the largest and best-preserved Neolithic settlements known, and a key witness to the Neolithic Revolution, the shift from hunting and gathering to settled farming. The name is Turkish and means "fork mound".

The older East Mound covers about 12.5 hectares and rises some 20 metres above the plain, the accumulated debris of as many as eighteen successive building levels. Houses were built wall to wall with no streets or lanes between them. People entered through openings in the roofs, climbing down timber ladders, and the flat rooftops served as the town's walkways and open spaces. Each house had plastered walls, a hearth and oven, and raised platforms, and the rooms were kept very clean, with rubbish dumped in middens outside. When a house was renewed it was partly knocked down and a new one built on its rubble, which is how the mound grew.

Population estimates have fallen as research has advanced. Early figures of 5,000 to 7,000 people have been revised by later work to between 600 and 800 on the East Mound in an average year of the middle phase, around 6700 to 6500 BCE. The inhabitants grew several kinds of wheat, barley and peas, gathered almonds, pistachios and fruit, managed cattle and sheep, and still hunted. Obsidian tools were made in large numbers and probably traded.

The dead were buried beneath the floors of the houses, often under platforms and hearths. Some skulls were later removed, and a few were plastered and painted with ochre to model faces. The walls carried paintings of hunting scenes, wild cattle, deer and vultures above headless figures, together with reliefs and mounted cattle heads. One painting has often been described as the world's oldest map, showing the town beneath the twin peaks of Mount Hasan, but some archaeologists, such as Stephanie Meece, read it instead as a leopard skin and a geometric pattern.

How to interpret the many figurines has been one of the site's great debates. The first excavator believed that female figures, including a seated woman flanked by felines, showed the worship of a mother goddess. Later excavators found that most of some 2,000 figurines represent animals and that fewer than 5 per cent depict women. Ian Hodder, who led the later work, has argued that men and women appear to have had similar diets and status and that the evidence does not point to either a matriarchy or a patriarchy. The absence of grand houses or public buildings has led many scholars to describe the community as broadly egalitarian, although a 2014 study found that some goods, such as grinding stones and storage, were unevenly shared.

The East Mound was abandoned after the Neolithic, apart from a few Bronze Age graves. Around 5600 BCE settlement moved to the smaller West Mound, across an old channel of the Çarşamba river, which was occupied in the Early Chalcolithic. Much later the East Mound was reoccupied in Phrygian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman times. Substantial buildings stood on its summit in the Hellenistic period, the Roman Empire built a fort there, and Byzantine coins have been found.

James Mellaart identified the site in 1958 and dug there in four seasons between 1961 and 1965, exposing nearly two hundred buildings. His career in Turkey ended with the scandal known as the Dorak affair, and it has since been strongly suggested that some wall paintings and figurine drawings he published were fabricated. Work resumed in 1993 under Ian Hodder, then of the University of Cambridge, whose project, which ran until 2018, became known for experimental and digital recording methods. Other teams have dug on the West Mound since 1998, and in 2025 a Polish team led by Arkadiusz Marciniak reported a building with the remains of 20 people beneath its floor.

UNESCO added the Neolithic Site of Çatalhöyük to the World Heritage List in 2012. A visitor centre run by the Konya Metropolitan Municipality opened at the site in 2023.